Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History [Paperback]
Author: Sheila M. Rothman | Language: English | ISBN: 0801851866 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Tuberculosis—once the cause of as many as one in five deaths in the U.S.—crossed all boundaries of class and gender, but the methods of treatment for men and women differed radically. While men were encouraged to go out to sea or to the open country, women were expected to stay at home, surrounded by family, to anticipate a lingering death. Several women, however, chose rather to head for the drier climates of the West and build new lives on their own. But with the discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882 and the establishment of sanatoriums, both men and women were relegated to lives of seclusion, sacrificing autonomy for the prospect of a cure.
In Living in the Shadow of Death Sheila Rothman presents the story of tuberculosis from the perspective of those who suffered, and in doing so helps us to understand the human side of the disease—and to cope with its resurgence. The letters, diaries, and journals piece together what it was like to experience tuberculosis, and eloquently reveal the tenacity and resolve with which people faced it.
- Paperback: 332 pages
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1 edition (November 1, 1995)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0801851866
- ISBN-13: 978-0801851865
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #103,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #48 in Books > Textbooks > Medicine & Health Sciences > Medicine > Special Topics > History
- #52 in Books > Textbooks > Medicine & Health Sciences > Medicine > Clinical > Infectious Diseases
- #77 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Internal Medicine > Pathology > Diseases > Viral
As Rothman, ruefully notes in her book there have been studies of medicine from the perspective of the doctor and from the perspective of the disease but not from the perspective of the patient.
Thus, Dr. Rothman sets out to do "a history of patienthood" and how being a patient changed over the course of time with respect to one single disease, TB or Consumption.
The problem is that her original sources are diaries, mainly of women but not exclusively. That by and of itself limits her subjects overwhelmingly to upper crust and educated NE families by and large. Overwhelmingly these are the well-off, relatively speaking. Theretofore, all of Rothman's democratic impulses are naturally very limited. The whole thrust of thesis is thus quite silly. This is not a history truly of patienthood, but of patienthood of the wealthy - of a small well-to-do segment of society.
What was it truly like to a patient with TB among the indigent and the poor? Rothman cannot really say for these people kept no diaries and if they did they were certainly not preserved a hundred and fifty years later in some library archives waiting for her to come find them.
Rothman gives us only the narrowest slice of what it means to be a patient.
Furthermore, this is a telling of history through anecdote. So she takes one, two, maybe 3 dozen diaries and summarizes what the people say in them. Who cares! To say these 3 dozen people are a representative sample (even among the upper crust educated elite of society) is downright silly.
It would be like someone reading 3 dozen blogs today on the net and saying they have a general sense of what society was thinking of the Iraq war. Who actually spends their time writing a blog?
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