Breathless Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India

"Andy McDowell's Breathless is one of the finest ethnographies in medical anthropology I have read over my long career. So accessible and complete is its review of theory and scholarly contributions, that I believe an entire course in medical anthropology could be taught using this book and its connections to the relevant scholarly literatures. The book is beautifully written and its use of the trope of atmospheric entanglements as a golden thread connecting the chapters is a magnificent example of why and how social theory matters to anthropology and the humanities, but also to medicine and public health. Almost twenty years of fieldwork and scholarly deliberation have helped create a masterpiece. Greatly impressive!"
-Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University "Breathless immerses us in the dynamic ecologies of tuberculosis in rural India. Everyday disruptions to life-a cough, a dusty diagnostic machine, a muddy road-each contain lessons in how people endure disease. With sensitivity and insight, Andrew McDowell recasts global health in atmospheric terms. What results is a stunning ethnography of embodiment, inequality, vitality, and care."
-Harris Solomon, Duke University "In exploring tuberculosis through its 'breathlines', Andrew McDowell illuminates the relationships between social inequality and public health in rural North India. Focusing on the socialities of breath and disease across intimacies of kin and hierarchies of caste, McDowell asks probing questions concerning the diffusions and entanglements between everyday community relations and the increasingly neoliberal postcolonial management of health. Subtle and deeply sensitive, Breathless forces us to think disease beyond constrained paradigms of illness and cure."
-Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago "McDowell's work fulfills its primary objective of creating a counternarrative focusing on atmospheric care for TB in India, and it shows how such an approach is both important and ought to be taken on by health care."-Annie James, H-Sci-Med-Tech "The sheer wordsmithery and depth of knowledge, with an involvement both in the telling of the tale and its constituents, is almost immediately apparent when you open Breathless."-Ramya Kannan The Hindu