The Tuberculosis Specimen

1.1.3: Seeing Hygiene, Sanatoria, and Doctors at Work

Introduction

Specimen Studies
0.1.1 | 0.1.2 | 0.1.3 | 0.1.4 | 0.1.5
Methods
0.2.1 | 0.2.2
The Structure of this Dissertation
0.3.1

Tuberculosis' Visual Culture

Visual Practices in Medical Culture
1.1.1 | 1.1.2 | 1.1.3
Seeing and Settling in the Sanatorium Movement
1.2.1 | 1.2.2 | 1.2.3 | 1.2.4 | 1.2.5
Teaching Public Health
1.3.1 | 1.3.2 | 1.3.3 | 1.3.4 | 1.3.5
Representing Doctors in Tuberculous Contexts
1.4.1 | 1.4.2

Using Human Specimens in the Study of Tuberculosis

Seeing Disease in Methyl Violet
2.1.1 | 2.1.2 | 2.1.3 | 2.1.4
Case Histories
2.2.1 | 2.2.2 | 2.2.3 | 2.2.4
Visceral Processes
2.3.1 | 2.3.2
Relation
2.4.1 | 2.4.2 | 2.4.3

Arts-Based Inquiry

Introduction
3.1.1 | 3.1.2 | 3.1.3 | 3.1.4
Terminal Imaginaries & Tuberculous Imaginaries
3.2.1 | 3.2.2 | 3.2.3 | 3.2.4 | 3.2.5 | 3.2.6
Dermographic Opacities
3.3.1 | 3.3.2 | 3.3.3 | 3.3.4
Tactical Pretensions
3.4.1 | 3.4.2 | 3.4.3

Designing Opacity

A Shift towards the Anticolonial
4.1.1 | 4.1.2 | 4.1.3 | 4.1.4
Refusals and Opacities
4.2.1 | 4.2.2 | 4.2.3 | 4.2.4
Digital and Ethical Workflows
4.3.1 | 4.3.2 | 4.3.3 | 4.3.4 | 4.3.5
Conclusion
4.4.1

Coda

Prometheus Undone
5.1.1 | 5.1.2 | 5.1.3 | 5.1.4

Appendix

The Tuberculosis Corpus
X.1.1 | X.1.2 | X.1.3
Web Design
X.2.1 | X.2.2 | X.2.3 | X.2.4
Installation Materials
X.3.1 | X.3.2 | X.3.3

Index

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This chapter emerged from some simple, open questions which I began asking while creating the image dataset (X.1.3): Why were there so many buildings photographed with no people in the frame, and why was there such an emphasis on architecture in the medical literature? What is happening with clean and dirty spaces? And where are the doctors in these books? These three questions relate to the main case studies that are examined in this chapter. In addition to these guiding questions, I also chose the three examples—sanitaria (1.2.1), hygiene (1.3.1), and doctors at work (1.4.1)—because they help me articulate the kinds of cultural practices which are most closely related to the case studies in the next chapter: they help me relay the capitalistic, ableist, and classist practices which proliferated around tuberculosis.

More than this, I look to these examples to give some historical context in more detail than I was unable to address in the introduction. These three case studies help me touch on trends that follow in the study and treatment in the decades following Robert Koch’s Die Ätiologie der Tuberculose in 1882 (2.1.1; 2.1.2; 2.1.3). At the same time doctors were studying tuberculosis, they were building sanatoria, they were engaged in discourses around public health, and, at least in America, they were involved in the gradual professionalization of the discipline at a national level.

These case studies show some of the implicit ways in which other aspects of tuberculosis’ visual culture ware framed, enacted, and reproduced. They also make explicit some of the practices which were sublimated in the actual specimens themselves. Starting with the sanatorium (1.2.1), moving to hygiene (1.3.1), and ending with the depictions of doctors (1.4.1), I will interlink the discipline’s surprising capitalistic investments, its penchant for pathologizing othered peoples, and its interest in promoting of its own laborers.


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TuberculosisSpecimen
The Tuberculosis Specimen

Sean Purcell

This dissertation examines the ways human subjects were turned into research objects as part of the war against tuberculosis.

Sean Purcell,2023 - 2025. Community-Archive Jekyll Theme by Kalani Craig is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Framework: Foundation 6.