126 BOOK REVIEWS Diego Armus, The Ailing City: Health, Tuberculosis, and Culture in Buenos Aires, 1870–1950 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011). ISBN 978-0-8223-5012-5 (PB). 37 B&W illustrations, x + 416pp. Romanticised by some, stigmatised by others, tuberculosis by virtue of its infectious nature is a social disease. Robert Koch discovered the bacillus in 1882. Antibiotics to treat the disease were discovered in the 1940s. In the interim, Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin developed a vaccine that became available in the 1920s. Like a number of historiographies of tuberculosis (see pp. 354–5 fn. 5), Armus’ book looks at that critical period covering the discovery of the bacillum, the development of vaccinations, and the advent of antibiotic treatment. With a focus outside the Global North, The Ailing City is one of the first books to document the social life of tuberculosis in a South American city. Writing the history of tuberculosis does not simply involve tracing how humans travelled from uncertainty to reason in searching for a cure for a disease. Tuberculosis fundamentally altered the human landscape in a range of significant ways and its history is not linear. The incapacity to sequester the spread and devastation of tuberculosis opened the space for all manner of regulations, surveillance, and secular moralising that infiltrated the most intimate parts of peoples’ lives. With unparalleled command of his topic and an incredible amount of primary resources, Armus analyses social context and the culture of medical practice in a multifaceted history of tuberculosis in Buenos Aires. Armus’ book starts at the end. By sharing a story about the panics and fears of a girl in 1955, Armus articulates the accumulation of several decades of uncertainty, pain, and anguish that tuberculosis inflicted upon Argentinians. Summarising each chapter in this spacelimited review would do little justice to the book (for an overview see pp. 14–17). The chapters are long but I encourage the reader to go the distance and trust the author. The third chapter, for example, discusses community, entitlement, and self-respect among people in sanatoria before jumping to the political life of various vaccines and serums. Seemingly disjointed, it takes a while before the reader realises that Armus needed to provide detailed context of the tense medical climate that received and yearned for vaccines. Each rewarding insight in The Ailing City is foreshadowed by a rich background that delivers: advertising and print media, public health, biomedicine, and hygiene are some of the biggest themes covered. Gender is also lucidly Health & History ● 16/1 ● 2014 127 unpacked. However, I find it a telling sign of the academic zeitgeist when women are listed in the index but men are not. Finally, I was left wanting more discussion of religion, given the accounts of ‘health pilgrims’, the ‘secular catechism of hygiene’, and ‘onanism’. The Ailing City reads like an anthology. The chapters stand alone and can be read independently, but they also cumulatively intertwine. By the time the reader arrives at the epilogue, Armus is able to make comments that act like metonyms that reference several of his earlier findings in parallel. I read the epilogue twice: once before reading the book and once after. While it was a wash of words the first time, it was like an entire topographical map of Argentine history unravelled in my mind upon second reading. I delighted in the thoughtful turn-of-phrase and revelled in the breadth of information. As a tanguero, I was fascinated by the references to tuberculosis in old tango songs. More than just anecdotes, however, Armus’ book beautifully unpacks how cultural expressions such as tango lyrics were intertwined to multiple strands of social, political, and economic activity. As an anthropologist, I find myself better equipped for fieldwork after having read this book. As a tuberculosis researcher, this book has strongly informed my understanding of the human response to this communicable disease within diverse social contexts. I strongly recommend this book to anyone working on tuberculosis in the laboratory, in the clinic, or in the field. Students of medicine, journalism, ethics, and history would also benefit from engaging with this work. The Ailing City is simultaneously a highly readable social science...