Upon my return a recent trip to Marshall Islands I was unfortunate enough to come down with typhoid fever, a derived infection by Salmonella typhosa, a bacterial infection commonly transmitted from feces of asymptomatic carriers or stool or urine of patients with active disease (The Merck Manual 1987:85). Easily contracted in tropical countries where health conditions are marginal, condition made sense to medical authorities in Montana who treated infection with antibiotics and, as required by law, informed health authorities in Marshall Islands. Unfortunately, tests that would confirm this condition were bungled by local hospital staff. Thus, etiology of was posited on basis of external symptoms open to a variety of interpretations. These symptoms had to bear burden of proof for diagnosis. Moreover, first sets of antibiotics, both injected into my body and administered orally, did not cure infection. Others would be administered, and seven weeks would pass before doctor and I agreed I was Neither my doctor nor I knew what hit me. Nonetheless, it was a condition that had to be classified and cured. This process of lending meaning and defining action involved appropriation and use of metaphors and tropes that classified and manipulated world at same moment they framed action scenarios that altered my body's physical state. The condition, which overcame me in Los Angeles, was displaced to Marshall Islands, since, after an incubation period that generally lasts for 8 to 14 days, with typhoid the temperature rises in steps over 2 to 3 days and remains elevated (usually to 39.4 to 40 C [103 to 104 F]), for another 10 to 14 days, begins to fall gradually at end of 3rd week, and reaches normal levels during 4th week (The Merck Manual 1987:86). In Los Angeles, I was six days Majuro, Marshall Islands, but more distantly removed Enewetak (by Western assessment, most likely point of infection). The ailment was classified as disease; not only dis-ease, but something pestilential. In that sense, it was type of malady that, at least until appearance of AIDS in late 1980s, Montanans have come to classify as atypically Western and dangerous.
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Mar 1, 2002
Karen Cassidy 
Open Access