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tubercular courtesan indicates that TB was also thought to make the sufferer sexy" (Sontag 1977, 25). Eventually, this romance bled over into a more diffuse concept of style of life and crafting of self. Sontag even states "The romanticizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as an image. The tubercular look had to be considered attractive once it came to be considered a mark of distinction, of breeding" (Sontag 1977, 29). |
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The person with tuberculosis became viewed as a romantic exile: "The myth of tuberculosis provided more than an account of creativity. It supplied an important model of bohemian life, lived without or without the vocation of the artist. The TB sufferer was a dropout, a wanderer in endless search of the healthy place" (Sontag 1977, 33). She also remarks, however, "Agony became romantic in a stylized account of the disease's preliminary symptoms. . . . and the actual agony was simply suppressed" (Sontag 1977, 29). |
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The work of finding a cure for TB thus involved myriad classificatory activities inserted into a shifting ecology of metrologies and images about temperament and constitution. Bates (1992, 28) notes that members of the Climatological Association in the 1920s compiled measures of altitude, humidity, temperature, sunlight, dampness of the soil, ozone in the air, and emanations from pine and balsam forests to uncover and classify the ideal placement for sanitarium situation. As Bates notes, though, a skeptic "might notice that many of the otherwise disparate conclusions shared one characteristic: physicians tended to discover health-giving attributes in their own locales" (28). Note here a formal similarity between arguments about the viral origin of AIDS and the idea of "cofactors" in lifestyle, including vague notions of stress, sexuality, and community (Shilts 1987). |
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It was and still is not clear when to stop classifying tuberculosis. As the following report on Bergey's manual of determinative bacteriology notes, there is a need to bring order into the classification "unclassified" when talking about tuberculosis: |
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Unclassified strains (formerly also know as atypical or anonymous). These species are not adequately differentiated at present. The term unclassified is generally reserved for the following strains isolated from human material which differ from the named species: |
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Photochromogens (M. kansasii, M. luciflavum, the yellow bacillus, Runyon Group I): these strains become yellow-pigmented only after exposure to light. Scotochromogens (Runyon Group II): the yellow-orange pigment of these strains is not completely light-conditioned. |
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