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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
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 …
“Failure Of Will”?: Tb Patient Narratives And Susan Sontag’S Illness As Metaphor, Bryon Dickon, Ashley Gonzalez
“Failure Of Will”?: Tb Patient Narratives And Susan Sontag’S Illness As Metaphor, Bryon Dickon, Ashley Gonzalez
Student Projects from the Archives
Susan Sontag outlines in Illness as Metaphor the romantic narratives of what she called a “tubercular personality.” Sontag writes the following in doing so, describing one key aspect of romantic tuberculosis: “TB was understood, like insanity, to a kind of one-sidedness; a failure of will or an overintensity…the tubercular was considered to be someone quintessentially vulnerable, and full of self-destructive whims” (63-64). “A failure of will” and “quintessential vulnerability” form a set of characteristics through which a narrative of the “tubercular personality” is constructed. The tubercular narrative Sontag describes is based on a wide variety of stereotypes. This creates a …