| Document Type
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BL
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| Record Number
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631973
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| Doc. No
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dltt
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| Main Entry
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Ott, Katherine
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| Title & Author
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Fevered lives : : tuberculosis in American culture since 1870 /\ Katherine Ott
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| Page. NO
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viii, 242 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates :: illustrations ;; 24 cm
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| ISBN
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0674299108
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: 9780674299108
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| Bibliographies/Indexes
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Includes bibliographical references (pages 169-232) and index
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| Contents
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Thinking about disease -- Sickbed and symptoms in the 1870s and 1880s -- The ecology of the chest -- Into the germ zone -- Laboring to get well -- Goods for the medical marketplace and invalid trade -- Race-ing illness at the turn of the century -- Mapping the hygienic state -- Playing the lone game of illness -- No magic mountain : the latest tuberculosis
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| Abstract
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What we understand today as pulmonary tuberculosis would have been largely unintelligible to a physician or patient in the late nineteenth century. Although medically the two terms described the same disease of the lungs, Ott shows that "tuberculosis" and "consumption" were diagnosed, defined, and treated distinctively by both lay and professional health workers. Ott traces the shift from the pre-industrial world of 1870, in which consumption was conceived of primarily as a middle-class malaise that conferred virtue, heightened spirituality, and gentility on the sufferer, to the post-industrial world of today, in which tuberculosis is viewed as a microscopic enemy, fought on an urban battleground and attacking primarily the outcast poor and AIDS patients
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Ott's focus is the changing definition of the disease in different historical eras and environments. She explores its external trappings, from the symptoms doctors chose to notice (whether a pale complexion or a tubercle in a dish) to the significance of the economic and social circumstances of the patient. Emphasizing the material culture of disease - medical supplies, advertisements for faraway rest cures, outdoor sick porches, and invalid hammocks - Ott provides insight into people's understanding of illness and how to combat it. Fevered Lives underscores the shifting meanings of consumption/tuberculosis in an extraordinarily readable cultural history
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| Subject
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Tuberculosis-- United States-- History
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| Subject
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History, 20th Century-- United States
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Tuberculosis, Pulmonary-- United States-- history
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| Subject
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History, 19th Century-- United States
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| Dewey Classification
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616.99500973
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| LC Classification
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RC309.A5O88 1996
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| NLM classification
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1997 B-872
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WF 11 AA1O8f 1996
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