Abstract
The anti-tuberculosis campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an unprecedented display of medical authority and public health purview. With accumulating evidence that the disease disproportionately struck the poor, tuberculosis by the early decades of the century was perceived epidemiologically as embedded in individual practices including hygiene and domestic order. Tuberculosis was in a sense a trope for national degeneration, and as such it became the vehicle for a self-conscious thrust towards national renewal and moral regeneration. This paper uses a feminist Foucauldian framework in its analysis of the anti-tuberculosis campaign. In the case of San Francisco, efforts to combat tuberculosis centred in part on women in their roles as wives and mothers. Women were the gatekeepers of health because they were responsible for keeping the home clean and bacillus free. Not only did this focus become a medical legitimization of women's domestic duties, but it also became a discourse of citizenship. Whether explicitly or implicitly, physicians concentrated their attention on white middle class women in their messages of health maintenance. Within sanatoria, a primary agenda of tuberculosis treatment was the inculcation of middle class behaviour into the working class patients. The anti-tuberculosis campaign was thus a part of the early-twentieth-century project of nationhood where citizenship was largely calculated through the lens of class and race.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 338-354 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | Journal of Historical Geography |
Volume | 27 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2001 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The research for this paper was made possible by a Social Sciences Research Council grant on Poverty and the Urban Underclass, and by a summer grant from the Women’s Studies Advisory Council of the University of Arizona. Portions of this paper, in a different form, are found in my book City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty and Deviance in San Francisco (Minnesota 2000). And thanks to Mike Dorn for comments on an earlier draft.