RAI Wellcome Medal Lecture
Wednesday 30 April 2025, 6.00-7.00pm BST
This is a hybrid event.
To join us at the RAI (Address), register here. To join us online via Zoom, register here.
On the occasion of Professor Venkat’s being awarded
the RAI Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems
At the Limits of Cure
Bharat Venkat (Associate Professor at UCLA)
Can a history of cure be more than a history of how disease comes to an end? In 1950s Madras, an international team of researchers demonstrated that antibiotics were effective in treating tuberculosis. But just half a century later, reports out of Mumbai stoked fears about the spread of totally drug-resistant strains of the disease. Had the curable become incurable? Through an anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India, this talk examines what it means to be cured, and what it means for a cure to come undone. Drawing on my book, At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021), this talk tells a story that stretches from the colonial period—a time of sanatoria, travel cures, and gold therapy—into a postcolonial present marked by antibiotic miracles and their failures. In this talk, I’ll juxtapose the unraveling of cure across a variety of sites: in idyllic hill stations and crowded prisons, aboard ships and on the battlefield, and through research trials and clinical encounters. If cure is frequently taken as an ending (of illness, treatment, and suffering more generally), my aim is to provide a foundation for imagining cure otherwise in a world of fading antibiotic efficacy.
Bio:
Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Institute for Society & Genetics, the Department of History, and the Department of Anthropology. His first book, At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021; Bloomsbury India, 2022), is the winner of three awards: the RAI Wellcome Medal (from the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Wellcome Trust), the Edie Turner Book Prize for Ethnographic Writing (from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology), and the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences (from the American Institute of Indian Studies). His current book project—titled “Swelter: A History of Our Bodies in a Warming World”— is about thermal inequality, the history of heat, and the fate of our bodies in a swiftly warming world riven by inequality. This book reflects on the existential and planetary crisis posed by extreme heat, but from the perspective of our bodies as they experience this crisis. Swelter will be published by Crown in the United States, and Picador in the United Kingdom. Dr. Venkat is also the founding director of the UCLA Heat Lab. His work has been funded by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and most recently, by a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, which is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty.
