This article is part of the following series: After the End of Disease
In “The Time that Is Left”, Giorgio Agamben sketches the problem of messianic time. He writes that the messianic is “not the end of time, but the time of the end. (…) the time that is left between time and its ending” (Agamben 2002, 2). In the following article, I want to take his reflection on messianic time as a …
This article is part of the following series: After the End of Disease
…Figure 1: Propaganda materials rehearsing the curability of tuberculosis are produced by a variety of institutional actors across India. From left to right: poster from Christian Medical College, Vellore (accessed via US National Library of Medicine); logo from Government of India’s Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP); and poster from a series developed by the Indian Development
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Christian McMillen’s Discovering Tuberculosis is many things, but mostly it is an account of failure. The book is a story of disease control in the twentieth century that is anything but controlled. McMillen gives needed attention to problems of the past that find themselves – unexpectedly, dangerously – occupying our present moment (though it should be made clear from …
It’s been gratifying and humbling to read these six thoughtful essays. I probably would have benefited from their insights before I published the book! Each and every one hits on something critical about the book, allowing me to think about the subject in new ways — even articulating elements of the story I did not fully realize were there.
My …
Back in 2003, before I set out to become a historian of medicine, I tracked media coverage of infectious diseases for the CDC’s Center for HIV, STDs, and TB. The TB part of the title, I was told, was a relict of the past and therefore not likely to appear in the news. By the time I had finished my …
It is hardly necessary to note that Christian McMillen has written an enormously important book. The history of tuberculosis control — outside the West and after 1950 — has so far been severely neglected by historians. We know so much about sanatoria and social reform in nineteenth-century western countries, and frustratingly little about the biomedical remedies more recently applied to …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology 