The Ailing City: Health, Tuberculosis, and Culture in Buenos Aires, 1870–1950

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Description

For decades, tuberculosis in Buenos Aires used to be more than a dangerous bacillus. It used to be also an anxious way of thinking 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 Unwell City, the historian Diego Armus explores the metaphors, state policies, and experiences associated with tuberculosis in Buenos Aires between 1870 and 1950. All the way through those years, the disease used to be conspicuous and frightening, and biomedicine used to be unable to offer an effective cure. Against the background of the global history of tuberculosis, Armus specializes in 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 affected by the disease accommodated and resisted official attempts to take care of them and to reform and keep an eye on their morality, sociability, sexuality, and day by day habits. The Unwell 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 viewpoint on the emergence of modernity in a cosmopolitan city on the periphery of world capitalism.

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