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Article ID: CBB221238025

A Vital Mediation: The Sanatorium, before and after Antibiotics (October 2019)

Venkat, Bharat Jayram (Author)

Technology and Culture
Volume: 60
Issue: 4
Pages: 979-1003

DOI: 10.1353/tech.2019.0098

URI: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/741380

Publication Date: October 2019
Edition Details: Special issue: History of Technology and South Asia
Language: English

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As drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis spread across India, commentators have warned that we are returning to the sanatorium era. Such concerns might be symptomatically read in terms of loss; however, prophecies of return might also signal that there is something to be regained. Rather than lamenting the end of the antibiotic era, I shift the focus to ask about the sanatorium, not simply as a technology of the past, but as a technology of an imminent future. In examining late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conversations about treating tuberculosis in India, I demonstrate how the the sanatorium was figured as a therapeutic technology that mediated the relationship between the body and its colonial milieu. In this light, I argue that contemporary prophecies of a future past register not simply the loss of antibiotic efficacy, but also a desire to return to a therapeutics that foregrounds issues of vitality, mediation, and environment.

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Includes Series Articles

Article Mukharji (October 2019) Akarnan: The Stethoscope and Making of Modern Ayurveda, Bengal, c. 1894–1952. Technology and Culture (pp. 953-978). unapi

Included in

Article Berger, Rachel (October 2019) Clarified Commodities: Managing Ghee in Interwar India. Technology and Culture (pp. 1004-1026). unapi

Article Prasad, Amit (October 2019) Burdens of the Scientific Revolution: Euro/West-Centrism, Black Boxed Machines, and the (Post) Colonial Present. Technology and Culture (pp. 1059-1082). unapi

Article Kumar, Prakash (October 2019) Introduction to Special Issue of T&C: History of Technology and South Asia. Technology and Culture (pp. 933-952). unapi

Article Kumar, Prakash (October 2019) "A Big Machine Not Working Properly": Elite Narratives of India's Community Projects, 1952–58. Technology and Culture (pp. 1027-1058). unapi

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http://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB221238025/

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