History of Medicine

The victims of tuberculosis (usually known as consumption) included not only Keats, The Brontës, Chopin and Chekhov, but members of almost every family. It was a killer on a huge scale. The White Death is an outstanding history of tuberculosis.

Consider two polar images of the same medical condition: the pale and fragile Camille ensconced on a chaise in a Victorian parlour, daintily coughing a small spot of blood onto her white lace pillow, and a wretched poor man in a Bowery flophouse spreading a dread and deadly infection. Now Katherine Ott chronicles how in one century a romantic, ambiguous affliction of the spirit was transformed into a disease that threatened public health and civic order. She argues that there was no constant identity to the disease over time, no core tuberculosis.

This work provides a historical and comparative analysis of modern Japan's epidemic of tuberculosis. It demonstrates the links between such epidemics and the social changes that accompanied modernization, and examines the responses of states, private organizations and individuals to these epidemics

In this first English-language study of popular and scientific responses to tuberculosis in nineteenth-century France, David Barnes provides a much-needed historical perspective on a disease that is making an alarming comeback in the United States and Europe. Barnes argues that French perceptions of the disease--ranging from the early romantic image of a consumptive woman to the later view of a scourge spread by the poor--owed more to the power structures of nineteenth-century society than to medical science. By 1900, the war against tuberculosis had become a war against the dirty habits of the working class.

Using a wide range of sources, especially the extensive correspondence of a Philadelphia physician, Lawrence F. Flick, Barbara Bates portrays the lives of tuberculous men and women as they tried to cope with the illness, get treatment, earn their living, and maintain their social relationships.

Throughout history, tuberculosis has been at or near the top of the list of infectious diseases that have plagued humankind. This pervasive disease has had a central position not only in causing illness but also in challenging medical scientists to understand it -- and, in so doing, to further understand all of human health and illness. Pioneers in Medicine and Their Impact on Tuberculosis tells the stories of six of these individuals: Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec (pathology), Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch (bacteriology), Hermann Michael Biggs (public health), Clemens von Pirquet (immunology), Wade Hampton Frost (epidemiology), and Selman Abraham Waksman (antibiotics). It examines not only their contributions in their own fields but also their special work in conquering tuberculosis.

Until a decade ago, the conquest of tuberculosis seemed one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. The resurgence of TB in the wake of AIDS has to be understood, Georgina Feldberg argues, in the context of decisions the U.S. Public Health Service made, beginning in the 1930s, to prevent TB through improved hygiene and long-term treatment with medications, rather than program of BCG vaccination that Canada and many other countries adopted. Feldberg's aim is not to judge which was the right choice, but to explain why the U.S. rejected the vaccine and the consequences of that choice.

In 1882, Robert Koch discovered the TB bacillus, signaling a redirection of medical thinking from the trial and error guesswork of individual experience toward medical care based upon science. Professor Ellison uses the career of Edward Livingston Trudeau (1848-1915), a recognized leader in the American crusade against tuberculosis, to examine the development of medical science as a human process.

A multi-generational social history of a disease now making an alarming comeback, this book spans 150 years, and tells the story of tuberculosis from the vantage point not of doctors and hospitals, but of patients and communities.

The first study of the personal, social and economic consequences of tuberculosis. A brilliant, wittily scarifying contribution to the history of ill-health.