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tuberculosis, but their actual impact on outcomes is not known" (Bates 1992, 320). And as they were not accounted for, and embedded in other treatments, they may never be known. |
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Classification: A Still Life Constantly in Motion |
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With all these historical trajectories being inscribed into the course of tuberculosis at whatever unit of analysis (humanity, the disease, the body, or the experience of the patient), it will come as no surprise that the work of classifying tuberculosis has generally had very complex temporal ramifications that have often led to problems in classification. They have also led to a sense by those in sanatoria of tuberculosis as inhabiting a phantasmagoric landscape, a borderland filled with monstrous experiences and distortions of time and self (Mann 1929, Roth 1963). The reasons for this are not simply the physical horrors of the disease, though those are terrible enough, but the ways in which our four strands play out against each other in imagination. We are not saying they are separate, but the fact that they are treated as such emerges as very important in the gap between experience and myths so well explicated by Mann and Roth. |
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One wants to classify tuberculosis first and foremost to say whether or not a particular patient has the disease. This information can be used to suggest a treatment trajectory for the patient, and a trajectory for officials in public health. Said trajectories depend on the current theory of the disease treatmentquarantine, isolation, mountain air, antibioticsas well as for symbol makers and writers. Tuberculosis has been the poetic illness, the disease of the "sensitive" during the nineteenth century often thought an ideal, ladylike disease for middle-class women. |
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Tuberculosis classification work is not easy. In the first place, the disease itself is, according to the official handbook, protean and possibly becoming relatively more so over time: "When faced with a difficult diagnosis, the clinician does well to keep tuberculosis in mind, for its mode of onset and course are protean. This needs to be urged all the more now that tuberculosis is becoming relatively less frequent" (Diagnosis 1955, 23). |
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Further, the disease does not have a single cause. Most tuberculosis in humans, according to official accounts, is caused by mycobacterium tuberculosis, but one should not forget mycobacterium bovis and mycobacterium avium. It does not appear in a single place; generally the |
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