In the 26th episode, I speak to Bharat Venkat, Assistant Professor at Institute for Society and Genetics in the Department of History, UCLA, on his new book At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021). The book’s an anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India that asks fundamental questions about what it means to be cured of a disease and what happens when cures don’t pan out. The conversation begins by asking Venkat what he means by cures and how we, as a society, determine when a cure is a cure or what conditions and factors influence and inform that determination. Next, I cover the puzzle that’s at the heart of the book: why individuals die of TB from other conditions like HIV after being treated. The book’s focus on India brings up the issue of why Indian cities became vulnerable to TB, sifting and weighing how different conditions, political, historical and structural, influenced TB patterns in the country. The conversation moves to understand how geography or ‘place’ interacts with these contextual factors to shape cures. Venkat also unpacks whether and how political economy considerations, that increasingly center around the discourse of chronic diseases which require sustained care and treatment, shape current notions of cure and being cured. Before ending, the conversation covers how Venkat sees or places the book from a disciplinary perspective, the impact of COVID-19 on our understanding of cures, the hardest parts of writing the book, and what he’s working on now.
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