The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis

This is a rad history if you have any interest in the subject, highly recommended. It is devoid of soft abstraction, fashionable theoretic apparatus, and similar wastage. It's repletely informed and documented, and usually fascinating. The style is distinctive but subdued and effortless. The only (probable) error I could notice was the passing assertion that Domagk's own daughter was the first human to receive Prontosil. I have seen this claim elsewhere, but more detailed accounts of the development of Prontosil state that her treatment was in fact subsequent to the first several human trials.

This book is loaded with information but it could have been much better indexed. I also wonder why no mention is made anyplace about Seaview Hospital in Staten Island, NY, which was the largest municipal TB hospital in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century, and contributed much in the fight against TB. Then again, maybe I missed it and Seaview is mentioned, but it's not indexed.

From Antiquity, tuberculosis has been a killer on a huge scale, ever-present yet lurking rather than epidemic; its explosion in the 1800s went hand-in-hand with industrialization, abetted by bad housing, endless work hours & poverty.For the Victorians, who elevated illness to art forms, the victims of TB were the ultimate in pale & interesting; the roll call of tuberculous genius reads like who's who of artists & writers: Keats, Chopin, the Brontes; Robert Louis Stevenson, Chekhov, Orwell, to name only a few. Thomas Dormandy has written an engrossing account of the amazingly complex social, artistic & natural history of this ubiquitous disease as well as a telling chronicle of the medical profession at its worst & best.This is one vitally informative, compelling & erudite volume on an affliction that has been with us since we began burying our dead, drawing on walls & writing. Make no mistake, TB is with us still! It is now mutating upon the new vectors of HIV, prisons, orphanages & multidrug resistancy.The White Death is an impressive & eminently readable history! Do check out my eInterview with this respected author - I think you will be as amazed as I!

There have been some reasonably satisfying works written on the cultural aspects of tuberculosis, and others on the scientific struggle to understand and control the disease. What makes this work unusually rewarding is that Dormandy (a consultant pathologist and medical writer) possesses the ability and education to bring together TB's medical and cultural aspects. He is equally comfortable discussing the influence of TB on the German Lied tradition and the interaction between the disease organism and the immune system.The White Death is particularly strong on TB's influence on European high and Bohemian culture and on the stories of individual scientists and doctors involved in research and treatment. Dormandy has a bit less patience for the bureaucratic history of public health and the political intrigues of academia, a feeling I share. I particularly enjoyed the opinionated and informative footnotes.

When the whole world seemed to be suffering with flu last winter I read and thoroughly enjoyed "Flu" by Gina Kolata. I caught the sickness bug (bad pun) and read several more social-history books about deadly diseases and living conditions in the past, and Dormandy's "The White Death" was by far the best. We readers are all familiar with the idea of the limp, frail tubercular Victorian who is tragically going to waste away before his magnus opus is finished, but do we realise that until fairly recently, tuberculosis was so common - in fact expected in certain circles - that the wasted tubercular look was actually fashionable amongst the artistic and indolent (early heroine-chic?)? This very readable book charts the long and difficult fight between the medical establishment and tuberculosis - a disease that wasn't fussy who it struck or where it struck. Of course, the poor slum-dwellers didn't stand a chance, but history does not record their names. What is striking is how many well known figures it hastened to an early grave - some of the finest artists, writers and minds of Europe, including the Brontës, Keats, Modigliani, Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and George Orwell. It also rampaged through several royal households at various times. What made it so cruel was its slowness and the way it toyed with its victims. Availed with all that quackery could offer, the patient could have several seeming "recoveries" before eventually fading. Dormandy describes some of the practises of doctors in their battle against tuberculosis - you will have to read them for yourself! Gradually inroads were made by the scientific community but only after generations of sickness. Incredibly it was a long time before the idea of quarantine caught on (in Italy)! An interesting and readable medical and social history that becomes more compelling when you know that tuberculosis is again on the rise. Drug-resistant strains have been found, and it seems that whilst battles may have been won, the war may still be lost.