|
|
|
|
|
|
|
of certain abnormal and transcendental experiences in actual life" (Mann 1929, 561). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
We are reminded here of Michel Serres' (1980) invocation of the passage between the natural and humanistic sciences as indeterminate, twisted, and full of ice floes; of the images of cyborg and monster pervading feminist theory about technology (Haraway 1992; Casper 1994a, 1994b, 1995). The following section offers a model for how such a monstrous borderland terrain is constructed and maintained. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Trajectories and Twists: The Texture of Action |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
No one can ever know for certain just when tuberculosis becomes active or when it becomes inactive. For that matter, one can never be certain that the disease is inactive, and a patient could logically be kept in the hospital for the rest of his life on the assumption that some slight undetectable changes might be occurring in his lungs.
(Roth 1963, 30) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The same train brought them as had Hans Castorp, when years ago, years that had been neither long nor short, but timeless, very eventful yet "the sum of nothing," he had first come to this place.
(Mann 1929, 520) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Body-Biography Trajectory: Strauss and Corbin |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
We present our model of the TB landscape in three parts of an ongoing conversation among all the authors analyzed. First is a model developed by Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin to describe what happens in the course of a chronic illness (1988, 1991). They posit that bodies and biographies unfold along two intertwined trajectories (the body-biography chain), nestled in a matrix of other structural and interactional conditions. For example, a heart attack may temporarily interrupt work, home life, creativity, dragging down the trajectory of biography. This in turn is contingent on a number of other circumstances such as access to health care, living in a war zone, or having another illness that makes recovery longer. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The chain may be viewed geometrically as a topography emerging from the interplay of these factors. Many illnesses do not have such an acute nature; during a long chronic illness there is a back-and-forth tugging across the trajectory of the disease-body and of the person's biography within the conditional matrix. The title of Kathy Charmaz' Good Days, Bad Days: Time and Self in Chronic Illness throws this relation |
|
|
|
|
|