Aftosa

Aftosa is a recurring disease term whose meaning remains unstable across the book. It is attached to a sick woman, a blind man subjected to mob violence, an imagined outbreak said to have escaped from a Bolivian lavatory, and a horse in pain. These appearances do not form a single medical case history. Their force comes from the contrast between disease as bodily affliction and disease as a label deployed within social, political, and grotesquely comic narratives.

References and Recurrences

In a coarse exchange between Doc and Arch Anker, Arch describes his wife Liz as gravely ill after eleven miscarriages and says that medicines Doc sold her eye drops that left her unable to distinguish night from day. Doc lists aftosa among her ailments, alongside carbuncles, cataracts, chilblains, and hemorrhoids. The dialogue folds a potentially serious illness into a comic, degrading catalogue, while the account of Liz’s condition suggests that treatment itself has worsened her impairment. Aftosa is not explained or independently diagnosed in this episode; it functions as one item in an unreliable-seeming exchange whose casual cruelty makes medical language part of the characters’ abuse.

Disease, Violence, and Social Control

A later recollection locates an aftosa-afflicted Black man in a vacant lot near Grennel Bog. The man is said to have been left blind by the disease. After a white girl complains that he is looking at her, Roy Bane says that he and the other men will burn him. The passage connects illness and disability not to care but to the threat of racist mob violence. The disease is reported as background to the scene, while the men’s proposed response exposes the much more immediate danger created by prejudice and collective power.

Elsewhere, a doctor explains state policy by comparing sexual difference to tuberculosis. He describes the state’s role as adjusting its arrangements to individual citizens, then argues that illness can impose public-health obligations, including compulsory treatment or isolation where needed to protect others. He presents these measures as reasonable and minimally burdensome, and Carl Peterson initially agrees. But the doctor’s subsequent explanation turns the exchange into a coercive examination: he calls Carl in for a supposed psychic equivalent of a fluoroscopic test, despite Carl’s insistence that he is heterosexual and plans to marry a woman. The clinical analogy matters because it shows how the language of disease can make state scrutiny appear benevolent and routine. Aftosa is not named in this policy discussion, but the book’s other disease references sharpen the contrast between public-health language and the harms it may conceal.

Historical Mutation and Animal Suffering

In a fantastical historical recollection, a speaker claims that a strain of human aftosa developed in a Bolivian lavatory two years before 1963, then escaped through the medium of a chinchilla coat and became involved in an income-tax case in Kansas City. The same passage moves abruptly to Liz’s claimed immaculate conception and the birth of a six-ounce spider monkey. These claims belong to the book’s wildly associative narration, not to a reliable chronology or medical record. By transforming an illness into a strain that can travel through an object and enter an unrelated legal case, the passage makes disease part of a comic, unstable chain of transmission and causation.

The final recurrence shifts from human illness to an animal’s distress. A Texas sheriff is said to have killed his accomplice, a veterinarian known as Browbeck the Unsteady, who was involved in a horse-heroin racket. The adjacent fragment says that a horse with aftosa needs heroin to ease its pain, then imagines some of the drug crossing the prairie and whinnying in Washington Square. The passage entangles veterinary illness, drug commerce, and the city through surreal transformation. Here the term gives the horse’s suffering a specific cause within the fragment, while heroin is presented as relief and as a substance that seems to migrate beyond its original setting.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, aftosa never settles into a stable definition. The references range from a list of ailments and an account of blindness to an invented epidemic and a horse’s need for pain relief. Their discontinuity is meaningful: the book places the vocabulary of illness inside shifting voices and scenes, where diagnosis may be casual, fantastical, or bound up with institutional power. The term’s recurrence therefore links otherwise separate forms of vulnerability without making them equivalent. It also keeps open a central tension in the disease passages: bodily suffering is real within the scenes, but the language used to describe it can be distorted, exploited, or turned into a device for violence and absurdity.