Re: The White Death—A History of Tuberculosis

[Guest guest]

Good evening, ,

Nope, nothing new, but some reporters do not know that whereas others

are better informed. One article on this did note that it was

widespread but concentrated in SA. Below is a bookreview of a

history of TB which would be worth reading.

" The White Death—A History of Tuberculosis " by Dr C. Spencer

Dormandy,Hambledon Press, 1999.ISBN 1-85285-169-4. £25.00

`Between 1864 and 1889 the mean life expectancy of Prussian nuns,

declared healthy on entry into the noviciate, was three years as a

result of tuberculosis.'

`Between 1803 and 1810 Britain imported some 4000 Mozambique army

volunteers to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to form new regiments. By 1820, 3640

(91%) of these unfortunates were dead from tuberculosis.'

These are just two of the fascinating facts that Dr Dormandy

has collected in this brilliant history of the effect, investigation,

false dawns and ultimately successful treatment of tuberculosis from

Roman to modern times. The list of luminaries who died or suffered

from tuberculosis is impressive: Keats, , Chekhov, all of the

six Bronte children, Chopin, Paganini, Tsarevitch ,

Louis son, Kafka, D. H. Lawrence and finally Orwell—

probably England's finest author of the 20th Century. Even as late as

1967, tuberculosis killed Vivien Leigh, the star of `Gone with the

Wind'. However, whilst this disease accounted for many of the great

and the good, it was, and still is, above all else a disease of the

poor. It was a mass killer in England during the first quarter of the

19th Century as the industrial revolution arrived. It is interesting

to note that then, as in modern Russia and the USA, prisons, on

account of their overcrowding, were an unending source of the

disease. Before 1910 no American `lifer' lasted more than 12 years,

and between 1890 and 1895 tuberculosis was the assigned cause of

death in 75% of the prison population in the state of Massachusetts.

The book includes an interesting chapter on the spread of bovine

tuberculosis via milk and the different steps taken to counter this

threat by authorities in the USA (active) and the UK (inactive). Once

again, the interest of the British farmer appeared to outweigh the

interests of the health of the British nation. As late as 1938 the

government-sponsored Milk Industry Bill, a relatively modest

assortment of preventative measures which would have enabled (but not

compelled) local authorities to impose pasteurization of milk, was

defeated in the House of Commons at its first reading. In 1946, 7–10%

of `pasteurized' milk sold in London contained live tubercle bacilli.

This is a superb book on the history of tuberculosis and is to be

recommended reading for all—young and old. There are lessons that

should have been learnt but were not by the medical fraternity. Sir

Pickering, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University,

said in 1968, `The history of medicine is a monument to human folly'.

I am sure Keats could identify with that statement when, 150

years previously, he received the recognized treatment for early

consumption at the hands of his surgeon, Mr Rodd; repeated blood

letting and a near-starvation diet!

Dr C. Spencer is at the Bristol Public Health Laboratory,

Bristol Royal Infirmary, Marlborough Street, Bristol BS2 8HW, UK

Book review from the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (1999) 44,

423 by the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.

http://jac.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/44/3/423

>

> People are acting like this is something new. Drug-resistant TB

has been around for a number of years and is already resident in the

general population. Here in San Francisco it is a particularly

serious problem in our Asian communities.