Of Lungs and Lungers: The Classified Story of Tuberculosis

The experience of a long-term chronic illness weaves together problems in biography, the body, and the cultural and organizational meanings of the disease. Time meets infrastructure; experience meets classification. We present here a close reading of two studies of tuberculosis: Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain and Julius Roth's empirical work Timetables. Drawing on research in medical sociology and information science, we show how the trajectories of disease, biography, and institution weave together. Mismatches in the trajectories produce distortions (or torques) in time and sense of self, accounting for the phantasmagoric imagery often associated with tuberculosis. We conclude with some general observations about how the concept of trajectory might be used in understanding the intersection of biography and organization.