The White Plague Returns · Episode 2 of 12 · 21 min
The White Plague
For centuries consumption was a fashionable, even beautiful death, until Robert Koch showed on March 24, 1882 that it was an infection. The episode traces tuberculosis from an ancient burial through the Romantic age to crowded industrial cities, and New York's first reporting rules and spitting law. It closes on the great argument over whether better food and living conditions, rather than medicine, brought the disease down.
Who's who
- Robert Koch+4 more episodesGerman physician who announced the tubercle bacillus in 1882
- John KeatsEnglish poet who died of tuberculosis in 1821, aged twenty-five
- HippocratesGreek physician who described phthisis, a wasting of the lung
- René LaennecFrench physician who invented the stethoscope and died of TB in 1826
- Jean-Antoine VilleminFrench army physician who showed in 1865 that TB was infectious
- Hermann Biggs+1 more episodeNew York health official who pressed for TB reporting and control
- Thomas McKeown+1 more episodePhysician who credited better nutrition for the fall in TB deaths
- Simon Szreter+1 more episodeHistorian whose 1988 paper critiqued McKeown
Where it happens
- Atlit-Yam, IsraelSubmerged village with a nine-thousand-year-old TB burial
- Berlin, Germany+2 more episodesWhere Koch announced the bacillus in 1882
- New York City+13 more episodesPioneered TB reporting rules and an 1896 spitting law
- Rome, Italy+1 more episodeWhere Keats died in 1821
Timeline
- c. 7000 BCEA woman and infant are buried at Atlit-Yam with signs of human tuberculosis
- February 23, 1821Keats dies of tuberculosis in Rome
- March 24, 1882Koch announces the tubercle bacillus in Berlin
- 1896New York City outlaws spitting in public places and on transit
- 1897New York requires reporting of every tuberculosis case
- 1982A proposal is made to mark 24 March as World Tuberculosis Day
Still debated
Why tuberculosis declined is still debated: McKeown credited nutrition and living standards, Szreter public health politics, and others isolation of the infectious and ridding cattle of TB. The age of the disease is also argued, as is how far the Romantic ideal of consumption reached beyond the comfortable classes.
