Radical Prescription examines the nexus of grassroots activism and state power in twentieth-century Cuba through the lens of tuberculosis. Amid the revolutionary fervor of the 1920s and 1930s, ordinary citizens demanded greater state responsibility over the treatment and eradication of tuberculosis. Building on early republican medical nationalism, these grassroots health activists forged an activist political subculture around the disease. They rejected discourses of hygienic citizenship, which tended to blame tuberculars for their illness, and articulated a broad vision of health citizenship that encompassed not just expanded access to health care but also measures to address socioeconomic inequalities like housing, race, labor conditions, and nutrition as determinants of health.
Kelly Urban argues that popular pressures transformed state responses to tuberculosis into a site of state formation. Grassroots activism helped galvanize political will to invest in antituberculosis campaigns, catalyzing an important shift in state approaches to public health. Whereas early republican administrations,...
