Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India

Welcome to Ambawati. A village in Rajasthan, midway between Delhi and Mumbai, where the western wind kicks up a dust. It irritates the lungs. The residents are mostly Adivasis and Dalits. Tuberculosis is rampant. It is entangled with inequality. This is the price the marginalized pay for health and policy decisions made in faraway Delhi and Geneva. Andrew McDowell gets entangled in the lives of the people of Ambawati, spending time at tea stalls, clinics, bedsides, fields, forests, and with nurses, doctors, quacks, mediums and mystics. He shows us how TB is an atmospheric illness dictated by social and biological realities.