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Tuberculosis was a killer on a huge scale, ever present and lurking rather than epidemic. The explosion of tuberculosis in the nineteenth century went hand in hand with rapid industrialization and was fomented by bad housing and poverty. From Roman times, the disease fascinated and frustrated doctors, who described its symptoms without understanding its causes. For the Victorians, who elevated illness and morbidity into art forms, the victims of tuberculosis were the ultimate in pale and interesting, not least because they were so often young and gifted. The roll call of genius reads like an anthem for doomed youth: Keats, Chopin, the Brontes (Charlotte, Emily and Anne), Robert Louis Stevenson, Chekhov, Orwell, to name but a few. The dying heroine became as much the stock in trade of Romantic fiction and painting as of opera. This engrossing account of the complex social, artistic and natural history of tuberculosis is also a chronicle of the medical profession at its best and worst. Thought of as hereditary until the isolation of its bacillus in 1882 (in and of itself a remarkable tale), tuberculosis prompted an astonishing range of treatments, from the plausible and well intentioned to the bizarre. Victims traveled south or, in America, west in the hope of recovery. Sanatoriums sprang up, each offering its own invariably lengthy and often unsuccessful cure - in the process making a fortune for its owners.
Laying waste to entire generations, tuberculosis lacked an effective treatment until after the Second World War, and a cure still eludes us today. While we tend to think of TB as a disease of another era, it remains among the most dangerous infectious diseases in the world, taking over 1,5000,000 lives annually. In many parts of the world, it is a bigger killer than AIDS, while in America and Europe drug-resistant strains threaten a devastating resurgence. Also includes information on blood-letting, bone and joint tuberculosis, bovine tuberculosis, chemotherapy, chest surgery, collapse therapy, consumption, Austria, Denmark, diagnosis, diet, exercise therapy, France, fresh air therapy, galloping tuberculosis, Germany, Holland, Hungary, immobilization, immunology, India, Ireland, Italy, Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch, D.H. Lawrence, lymph-node tuberculosis, Katherine Mansfield, multi-drug resistance, Nobel Prize winners, Norway, Louis Pasteur, Sir Robert W. Philip, poverty, pulmonary tuberculosis, remedies, rest therapy (rest cure), Roman medicine, sanatorium regime, streptomycin, Sweden, Switzerland, therapies, Edward Livingston Trudeau, tuberculin, United States, Wales, walking therapy, work therapy, x-rays, etc.
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