Consumed by Disease: Medical Archives, Latino Fictions, and Carceral Health Imaginaries

Chapter author: Christopher Perreira

Page author: jlc

Summary
Through an analysis of Alejandro Morales’s novel The Captain of all these Men of Death, Christopher Perreira analyzes the experiences of racialized individuals in the Olive View Sanatorium to examine disease in the context of California public health. Perreira’s “carceral health imaginaries” connects the “temporalities of medical technologies, the lives that live within them, and the way racialized patients were both moved through and contained” (52). The Sanatorium, tuberculosis, and behind-closed-doors procedures serve as the medical technologies at play, which target racialized bodies in the surrounding California community. This medical technology works because of its “operating in relative isolation and away from scrutiny of a broader public,” as if to work with impunity (53). Perreira posits that temporalities, memories, and cultural representation, such as those found in the novel, work to subvert or resist official medical documentation in this facility. Consequently, official history vis-à-vis collective memory, official history vis-à-vis cultural representations reframe and retell the experiences of racialized bodies in this sanatorium and its official history. The novel, Perreira advances, functions as a “catalogue of medical misery and carceral memory” (59). Through this work, Perreira uses the characters’ histories and their experiencing of inaccurate diagnosis, suffering ill-treatment, and witnessing disappearances. The analysis works to reframe the medical and science narrative of progress and instead positions it as a racial project.

Connection to other readings
Walter Benjamin writes, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight” (“On the Conception of History”). Perreira’s analysis of the sanatorium’s official history and those histories told by the characters in The Captain seem imbricated in this state of emergency because of the tuberculosis. That is, this disease creates allowable conditions for the (mis)treatment of racialized bodies.

Connection to other chapters
Scratch a Theory, You Find a Biography: A Conversation with Troy Duster: I am linking this chapter here because I think it fits. I'm not entirely sure how though, I'm honestly still working on it. I just read the summary and felt like this piece could pair well. I think it could be interesting to read this chapter and then look at this interview since this interview tracks both how sociology as a field was developing with science and tech and discusses research as well.