Description
Can a history of cure be more than a history of how disease comes to an end? In 1950s Madras, an international team of researchers demonstrated that antibiotics were effective in treating tuberculosis. But just half a century later, reports out of Mumbai stoked fears about the spread of totally drug-resistant strains of the disease. Had the curable become incurable? Through an anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India, Bharat Jayram Venkat examines what it means to be cured, and what it means for a cure to come undone. At the Limits of Cure tells a story that stretches from the colonial period—a time of sanatoria, travel cures, and gold therapy—into a postcolonial present marked by antibiotic miracles and their failures. Venkat juxtaposes the unraveling of cure across a variety of sites: in idyllic hill stations and crowded prisons, aboard ships and on the battlefield, and through research trials and clinical encounters. If cure is frequently taken as an ending (of illness, treatment, and suffering more generally), Venkat provides a foundation for imagining cure otherwise in a world of fading antibiotic efficacy. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research on tuberculosis in India, Bharat Jayram Venkat explores what it means to be cured and what it means for a cure to be partial, temporary, or selectively effective. Bharat Jayram Venkat is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics and in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Preface ix
Introduction. The Incurability of Fantasy 1
1. To Cure an Earthquake 23
2. Cure Is Elsewhere 77
3. From Ash to Antibiotic 121
4. Wax and Wane 165
5. After the Romance Is Over 209
Epilogue. India after Antibiotics 249
Acknowledgments 257
Bibliography 261
Index 281
“How does one narrate a story of endings? At the Limits of Cure chronicles the fantasies of ending tuberculosis and the end of disease itself. Tying evocative histories of science to nuanced ethnography, Bharat Jayram Venkat reveals the attachments to curative reason that bind the clinic, the nation, and the globe. This electric and stunningly original book is infused with curiosity.”
“At the Limits of Cure is a work of art. Its medium includes historical and biographical narrative, medical journals, mythology, film, literature, and the keenest of ethnography. Thinking cure this carefully—not as an object, but as a desire and praxis—proves to be both a magical and a melancholic endeavor, riven with failures, false starts, and incurable imagination. Readers, specialists, and dreamers in cultural and medical anthropology, South Asian studies, and science and technology studies will love this highly original book.”
“This superbly written book weaves together a remarkable tale of tuberculosis in India. It is at once a transnational history of medical science and technology, an ethnohistory of the experience of disease, an ethnography of medicine, a history of India through the lens of public health, and, at its core, a compelling discussion of the complex, cultural discourse on the concept of 'cure,' not only in the history of medicine, but in the desires of doctors and governments, the self-understanding of patients, and even in Hindu mythology.”
“Venkat invites readers on an in-depth journey into the history of tuberculosis in India. [At the Limits of Cure] provides an excellent introduction to the field of medical anthropology. Highly recommended. All readers.”
“Venkat’s storytelling is absorbing. He appears a writer who finds joy in crafting prose, sometimes imbuing it with a playfulness that lands most aptly. . . . This is a meticulously crafted book, but it is nowhere stilted or overworked. It performs deep conceptual labor with a jargon-free lightness of touch that academic writing would do well to emulate.”
“An important consideration of At the Limits of Cure is rethinking what the end-goal of cure is. Is it the absolute removal of illness? Venkat suggests not, and that the possibilities available to us for cures exist within the realms of what we, individually and communally, desire of them.”
"Venkat argues that the imaginations of cure often dictate and shape the narratives of disease. Cure narratives are pluralistic, varied, and have the power to challenge the seeming homogeneity and universality claimed by colonial histories of disease and cure. . . . The narrative of cure, as the author argues, is more than a history of how disease comes to an end."
"At the Limits of Cure brings a fresh perspective to a much-discussed disease and in the process transforms what we know about cure and chronicity in the history and anthropology of modern biomedicine. . . . For its methodological creativity with archival sources, attentive ethnography, and engrossing writing, the book will be a great choice in undergraduate and graduate classrooms."
"At the Limits of Cure . . . is a masterclass in thinking with, and through stories. The book is rife with interruptions and twists and turns. Digressions happen. Lines are drawn and followed. Paths break. . . . Just like cures, stories have to be imagined otherwise: without absolute endings and without the power to explain—or narrate—away the messiness of the life they stage."
“Venkat expertly weaves archival methods of the historian and ethnographic fieldwork of the anthropologist to tell a powerful story. . . . As we are coming to a new stage in the global pandemic, this book can contribute to important conversations about our own approaches to cure.”
"[At the Limits of Cure] is a feminist history of disease, a social ethnography of clinical encounters, and a cinematic critical fabulation of the sanatorium. . . . This book will be a foundational text for graduate students wrestling with social histories of disease and the social life of historical actors."
