The Ailing City: Health, Tuberculosis, and Culture in Buenos Aires, 1870–1950
Diego Armus is Associate Professor of Latin American History at Swarthmore College.
- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: Duke University Press Books; 1 edition (July 8, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0822350122
- ISBN-13: 978-0822350125
For decades, tuberculosis in Buenos Aires was more than a dangerous
bacillus. It was also an anxious state of mind shaped not only by fears
of contagion and death but also by broader social and cultural concerns.
These worries included changing work routines, rapid urban growth and
its consequences for housing and living conditions, efforts to build a
healthy “national race,” and shifting notions of normality and
pathology. In The Ailing City, the historian Diego Armus explores
the metaphors, state policies, and experiences associated with
tuberculosis in Buenos Aires between 1870 and 1950. During those years,
the disease was conspicuous and frightening, and biomedicine was unable
to offer an effective cure. Against the background of the global history
of tuberculosis, Armus focuses on the making and consolidation of
medicalized urban life in the Argentine capital. He discusses the
state’s intrusion into private lives and the ways that those suffering
from the disease accommodated and resisted official attempts to care for
them and to reform and control their morality, sociability, sexuality,
and daily habits. The Ailing City is based on an impressive array
of sources, including literature, journalism, labor press, medical
journals, tango lyrics, films, advertising, imagery, statistics,
official reports, and oral history. It offers a unique perspective on
the emergence of modernity in a cosmopolitan city on the periphery of
world capitalism.
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