Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History

Abstract

Now that tuberculosis is returning with a new vengeance, public and professionals alike have a heightened interest in this fascinating disease. Tuberculosis has plagued mankind since Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) period. It was present mostly in animals, with only sporadic human infections. The domestication of cattle in 18th century would crowd them together, and fact that people commonly lived above animal quarters to benefit from heat led to 18th-century epidemics in Europe. A human mutant variant can be traced to that time. Tuberculosis was dubbed the captain of all these men of death by John Bunyan in 1680. It was another 200 years before knowledge of infectiousness of tuberculosis was established by momentous demonstration by Robert Koch in 1882 that it was a bacterial infection. In prebacteriologic era, tuberculosis had been considered an inheritable disease, since it was found in many family