Shaping Indian biocitizens: Americanisation through medical education in the TB sanatorium paper Sioux San Sun (1938-1941).

The article aims to analyse health-related articles written for Sioux San Sun, an Indian tuberculosis sanatorium paper published between October 1938 and September 1941 in Sioux Sanatorium, Rapid City, South Dakota. To account for the ideological agenda behind the seemingly strictly informative content of the articles devoted to medical education, I apply the concept of biocitizenship. While biocitizenship is usually associated with the era of molecularisation, that is, the 21st century, I argue that it can be traced to the first half of the 20th century, when information campaigns about public health were engaged in the process of shaping medically informed biocitizens. By using particular biomedical language, this process resulted in the reconfiguration of individual personas within diverse spheres of authority, encompassing political, medical, legal and occupational domains. I believe that the main idea behind educational articles in Sioux San Sun is, apart from disseminating medical knowledge, to transform uneducated Indians into biocitizens.