Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in History
Tuberculosis Patient Number 296 In The Daniel Harris Papers, Margaret Stehura, Cristopher Shell, Zachary Piette
Tuberculosis Patient Number 296 In The Daniel Harris Papers, Margaret Stehura, Cristopher Shell, Zachary Piette
Student Projects from the Archives
This essay examines Susan Sontag's _Illness as Metaphor_ alongside Daniel Harris's studies of those admitted for tuberculosis care at the Saranac Lake Sanitarium. While both Sontag’s perceptions and Patient 296’s tubercular reality may not be 100% aligned with one another (i.e., lived experience of someone with tuberculosis versus historical perceptions of the disease itself), by combining both aspects we are able to develop a fairly crystalline image of what it was like to actually have tuberculosis at this point in time. In doing so, it becomes clear that while some perceptions of tuberculosis may have been fairly misguided, it was …