1.1.3: The Structure of this Chapter

This chapter’s many visual subjects lead to many kinds of seeing, which deserve their own inspections and interrogations, but following each thread would result in a much different final dissertation. Instead, this chapter will do two things. First, it will give a sense of the historical context in America around tuberculosis at the turn of the twentieth century through an examination of the various kinds of images printed in the corpus. This can give a glimpse into broad trends in the visual culture, and examine how visuality was constructed outside of the context of medical research. What will become apparent is a slippage between categories, partly due to a fuzziness in intended audience, and partly between what these medical institutions, authors, and publishers thought they should show. Second, developing from this, this chapter will leverage this collection of images to describe a much wider field than usually imagined by media studies scholars. Just as film studies can be broadened by an interest in the non-theatrical uses of cinematic technologies¹, and has seen scholars of these kinds of films interested in health and science,² media studies can benefit from a shift in focus and material. This chapter provides a bird’s eye view of the kinds of different visual cultures which intersect and contest meanings around health and wellness. It is too simple to limit health to a discursive top-down, doctor-centric view, and too simple to see patients, caretakers, and institutions in such a narrow view.

To make these claims, I will cycle through overlapping discussions about the disease, focusing first on large trends which effected the public’s understanding of tuberculosis—the sanatarium movement (1.2.0) and hygienic interventions against the disease (1.3.0). Working hand-in-hand, but at different scales and with different methods, these two cultural practices rose to prominence thanks in part to the microbial etiology of tuberculosis (3.x.x). Prior to Robert Koch’s 1882 study Die atiology der tuberculose, the disease was considered hereditary, and thus not transmissible between subjects. Linking tuberculosis to germ theory brought with it questions of contagion, spread, and personal responsibility. Hygienic interventions against the disease were taught by medical institutions like sanatoria, dispensaries, and hospitals, and much of the volunteer networks that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century worked to extend these hygienic lessons at different scales.

Following these sections, I am including two brief discussions of professional portraiture as it appears in the corpus (1.4.1), as well as some discussion of the many architectural diagrams also in the collected sources (1.5.1). These two sections will give a better sense of the professionalization of medical science as it developed in this period, in addition to the non-hygienic, environmental intevrentions against the disease. My interest in portraiture will become more significant in the second chapter (2.x.x), and the inclusion of this section will help give the interest in the portrait genre a helpful counter point.

I have tried to distill these snippets in such a way as to make them legible to readers, but in the process I have had to isolate these instances from the broader network of connections between actors, ideologies, and technologies. I am distilling these ideas to make a few concrete points, as well as to make the history of tuberculosis in America more legible for a breadth of scholars. This means that many nuances will require continued investigation and explaination, to which I encourage further scholarship. What I want to make clear, however, is that the ideas which are forwarded in the following sections are all interlinked: hygiene, the rise of medical science in America, the tuberculosis sanatorium, and the construction of the patient depend on each other to make sense of the disease, potential treatments, and the individuals responsible for care.