|
Showing 1 - 1 of
1 matches in All Departments
For more than 150 years, until well into the twentieth century,
tuberculosis was the dreaded scourge that AIDS is for us today.
Based on the diaries and letters of hundreds of individuals over
five generations, Living in the Shadow of Death is the first book
to present an intimate and evocative portrait of what it was like
for patients as well as families and communities to struggle
against this dreaded disease. "Consumption", as it used to be
called, is one of the oldest known diseases. But it wasn't until
the beginning of the nineteenth century that it became pervasive
and feared in the United States, the cause of one out of every five
deaths. Consumption crossed all boundaries of geography and social
class. How did people afflicted with the disease deal with their
fate? How did their families? What did it mean for the community
when consumption affected almost every family and every town?
Sheila M. Rothman documents a fascinating story. Each generation
had its own special view of the origins, transmission, and therapy
for the disease, definitions that reflected not only medical
knowledge but views on gender obligations, religious beliefs, and
community responsibilities. In general, Rothman points out,
tenacity and resolve, not passivity or resignation, marked people's
response to illness and to their physicians. Convinced that the
outdoor life was better for their health, young men with
tuberculosis in the nineteenth century interrupted their college
studies and careers to go to sea or to settle in the West, in the
process shaping communities in Colorado, Arizona, and California.
Women, anticipating the worst, raised their children to be welcomed
as orphans in other people's homes.In the twentieth century, both
men and women entered sanatoriums, sacrificing autonomy for the
prospect of a cure. Poignant as biography, illuminating as social
history, this book reminds us that ours is not the first generation
to cope with the death of the young or with the stigma of disease
and the proper limits of medical authority. In an era when a deadly
contagious disease once again casts its shadow over individual
lives and communities, Living in the Shadow of Death gives us a new
sense of our own past as it equips us to comprehend the present.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Morbius
Jared Leto, Matt Smith, …
DVD
R179
Discovery Miles 1 790
Merry Christmas
Mariah Carey, Walter Afanasieff, …
CD
R122
R112
Discovery Miles 1 120
|