A many-faceted history of tuberculosis which considers this disease
from early times on as ignorance, and false gentility, and finally
the romanticism of the 19th century shrouded the gravity of
consumption. And from the individual tragedies of Keats and Shelley
and the many literary lives in which tuberculosis was the pervading
presence, this goes on to the history of the illness- the old
beliefs and nostrums which give way to scientific fact with Koch's
identification of the bacillus; the widening knowledge (although
still conflicting theories) of diagnosis, susceptibility,
resistance and environment; the many therapeutic practices involved
in its treatment- nutrition, climate, surgery, rest, drugs; and
finally the longer and broader view of tubercudlosis in terms of
epidemics and mortality and populations, in terms of public health
and prevention and control- to the point where today the death rate
has been decreased- but the incidence has not been subdued..... A
popular perspective, which reflects not only the course of the
disease but the countries and societies in which it festered and
the shadow it still casts over many lives in many lands. (Kirkus
Reviews)
In The White Plague, Rene and Jean Dubos argue that the great
increase of tuberculosis was intimately connected with the rise of
an industrial, urbanized society and--a much more controversial
idea when this book first appeared forty years ago--that the
progress of medical science had very little to do with the marked
decline in tuberculosis in the twentieth century.The White Plague
has long been regarded as a classic in the social and environmental
history of disease. This reprint of the 1952 edition features new
introductory writings by two distinguished practitioners of the
sociology and history of medicine. David Mechanic's foreword
describes the personal and intellectual experience that shaped Rene
Dubos's view of tuberculosis. Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz's
historical introduction reexamines The White Plague in light of
recent work on the social history of tuberculosis. Her
thought-provoking essay pays particular attention to the broader
cultural and medical assumptions about sickness and sick people
that inform a society's approach to the conquest of disease.
General
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