:Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles.(Critical Issues in Health and Medicine.);Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative.(Critical Issues in Health and Medicine.)

Abstract

When my mother recently entered a nursing home to convalesce from a bad fall, she complained about many things, but perhaps nothing outraged her more than the mandatory tuberculosis (TB) test that was required of her. Having grown up “white” in California's Central Valley during the 1930s and 1940s, she understood tuberculosis testing not as common-sense and socially neutral public health measure but as something reserved for Mexicans and other outsiders. To be tested for TB was, in her mind, one more indication of her current powerlessness and threatened social status. She was right. It is this stigma of TB—its association with racialized and working-class bodies—and the policies that flowed from it that Emily K. Abel recounts in Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion. Focusing specifically on the city of Los Angeles, Abel shows us how the cultivation of a regional mythology of health in the late nineteenth and...