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dom from the sanatorium regime as well as, ultimately, the date of release. |
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Of no surprise to medical sociologists, the interpretation and negotiations of the tests between doctor and patient were fraught with questions of the social value of the patient (middle-class patients being thought more compliant and reliable when on furlough from the asylum than those from lower classes), with gender stereotypes, and with the gradual adaptation of the patient's biographical expectations to the period of incarceration. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Julius Roth's Timetables are full of stories of classification and metrication. We examine how different time lines, and expectations about those time lines, unfold in these two remarkable volumes. Biography, career, the state of the medical art with respect to the disease, and the public health adjudication of tuberculosis are all intertwined against the landscape of the sanatorium. |
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Life in the sanatorium has a surreal, almost nightmarish quality, as detailed by Mann, Roth, and many other writers throughout the twentieth century. This sense comes precisely from the misalignment of a patient's life expectations, the uncertainties of the disease and of the treatment, and the negotiations laden with other sorts of interactional burdens. It is one thing to be ill and in the hospital with an indefinite release date. It is quite another when the date of release includes one's ability to negotiate well with the physicians, their interpretation of the latest research, and the exigencies of public health forms and red tape. We call this agglomeration torque, a twisting of time lines that pull at each other, and bend or twist both patient biography and the process of metrication. When all are aligned, there is no sense of torque or stress; when they pull against each other over a long period, a nightmare texture emerges. |
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A similar torque is found in the second case in this section, that of race classification and reclassification under apartheid in South Africa. Between 1950 and the fall of apartheid forty years later, South Africans were ruled under an extremely rigid, comprehensive system of race classification. Divided into four main racial groupswhite/European, Bantu (black), Asian and coloured (mixed race)people's lives were rigidly segregated. The segregation extended from so-called petty apartheid (separate bus stops, water fountains, and toilets) to rights of work, residency, education, and freedom of movement. This system became the target of worldwide protest and eventually came to a formal end. These facts are common knowledge. What |
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