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At the Limits of Cure by Bharat Jayram Venkat (review)

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.2023.a911012

1097-3729

Amit Prasad,

History of Science and Medicine

Reviewed by: At the Limits of Cure by Bharat Jayram Venkat Amit Prasad (bio) At the Limits of Cure By Bharat Jayram Venkat. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. 304. In this extraordinary book, Bharat Jayram Venkat deftly interweaves history and mythology, archival material and ethnography, patient case histories and India's political history to investigate the "limits of cure." Specifically, Venkat interrogates the limits of cure through a conceptually and methodologically innovative exploration of a range of "stories" that cut across time and geography: Hindu mythology of Daksha's fury that made the moon wax and wane; the 1950s "Madras Trials" that were not only among the first tuberculosis (TB) clinical trials but also rigorously used this technique to test the efficacy of a medical compound; a TB patient, Nilam, who was declared cured several times, yet TB kept coming back; the experiences of Kamala Nehru, the wife of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in a sanitorium in Germany during her husband's anti-colonial struggles for India's independence; the poet Sambandar, who used his power of cure to convert a Pandya dynasty king to Saivism in the sixth century; and Robert Koch, who spectacularly provided proof of his mysterious cure for TB. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from historical records in London, Kolkata, and Chennai and in the possession of the main protagonists' descendants to ethnography at TB clinics and hospitals in India and analyses of films, novels, policy documents, and scientific papers, Venkat maps the limits of cure through a history of TB in India. Venkat's concern is twofold. On the one hand, he shows that the history of TB is replete with claims of cures, particularly when new techniques like the sanitorium or antibiotics emerged. However, patients' case histories strikingly revealed the limitations of these cures. The issue for Venkat is not simply the failure of cures. Indeed, as his careful examination of medical histories shows, "the specter of relapse forms a kind of limit, one that is not necessarily unsurmountable, but nevertheless remains at the heart of cure" (p. 155). He [End Page 1301] thus provides a unique understanding of cure: "This is not a world at the end, nor a world without end, but a world with an infinity of ends" (p. 252). On the other hand, Venkat uses the history of TB to critically interrogate the very idea and practice of cure and how these suffuse our imaginaries: "Our imagination of cure" and of "historical time … directs our thinking about what counts as proper knowledge, as well as the forms of research and evidentiary production that properly undergird such knowledge" (p. 6). Through juxtaposing "stories" of cure that cut across geographies and history, he simultaneously jolts us from our usual conceptions and presents an innovative way to imagine and historicize cure. "The magic of juxtaposition," as Venkat explains, allows us to "forge associations" and, more broadly, "create contexts" (p. 19) that vividly foreground "the kinds of effects produced by specific juxtapositions" (p. 18). Venkat's description and exegesis of specific juxtapositions do not allow readers to be outsiders to the history of cure. They experience those effects from the very first chapter, when Venkat deploys a narrative strategy often used in films or television to lead us in: "Maybe you'd begin in the summer of 1910," Venkat writes while discussing the history of Dharampur Sanatorium in the Sivalik Hills, the "first sanatorium in India to operate outside of the Christian fold" (p. 31). As he walks us through the history of the sanatorium, he imagines that A. C. Majumdar, the superintendent, "refills your teacup and begins telling you about his own background" (p. 31). This playful unfolding of the past does not reflect the author's whim but, over and beyond the descriptions of successes and failures, recurrently troubles our imaginations of cure. For example, through interviews with doctors after the discovery of drug-resistant strains of TB, Venkat highlights that the past animates the present-day technologies of cure and their imagined futures: "Rather than a rupture with the past, these ways of looking into the future are suffused by an intensification of a techno...