The white death : a history of tuberculosis
/ Thomas Dormandy.
- New York : New York University Press , 2000.
- xiv, 433 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
Originally published: London ; Rio Grande, Ohio : Hambledon Press, 1999.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
British pathologist Dormandy weaves together cultural and medical history with the skill of a learned, witty, and humane scholar. Exhaustively researched and documented, his book describes the havoc wreaked by tuberculosis over millennia--which, horrifyingly, was sometimes inflicted by physicians themselves. Happily, the search for a cure led also to significant medical innovations, including the stethoscope, antibiotics, and X-rays. More mundane advances, including park benches, bobbed hair, and an end to ornate Victorian decor, also emerged, as an appalling number of citizens of all social classes sought cures in sanatoria, where carefully calibrated exercise was a standard prescription and dust was relentlessly suppressed. Dormandy illuminates his medical history through the stories of dozens of artists and writers, from Keats and Chopin to Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, and Vivien Leigh, whose lives were tragically shortened before effective antibiotics became available in the 1940s and 1950s. Sadly, however, TB's protean bacteria quickly began to mutate into drug-resistant strains, and the search for a permanent cure or effective vaccine continues.