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Book ID: CBB981191824

At the Limits of Cure (2021)

Duke University Press
Publication date: 2021
Language: English

ISBN: 9781478014720

Publication Date: 2021
Edition Details: Book Series: Critical global health : evidence, efficacy, ethnography
Physical Details: 304

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Prevention and control of disease Public health Antibiotics Tuberculosis Drug resistance Disease and diseases Therapeutic practice; therapy; treatment 21st century 20th century 19th century India

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.

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Reviewed By

Review Catriona Ellis (2023) Review of "At the Limits of Cure". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 330-331). unapi

Review Amit Prasad (October 2023) Review of "At the Limits of Cure". Technology and Culture (pp. 1301-1302). unapi

Review Koyna Tomar (2022) Review of "At the Limits of Cure". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 677-678). unapi

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