But eventually, it faded from the lexicon. In the 20th century, most people started transitioning to tuberculosis. As such, it was common to send sick family members away to the countryside to recover. Thankfully, the discovery of antibiotics in the s changed everything.
Death rates of TB dropped dramatically, after centuries of mortalities. In , it affected 10 million people worldwide, and took the lives of 1.
One particular concern is antibiotic-resistant TB, which is even more challenging to treat. The goal is to end the TB epidemic by , which could save millions of lives. September 3, Loading the player The paper will further try to show how, in the early nineteenth century, the idea arose that consumption was the disease of the proletariat suffering from metropolitan life.
Abstract At the start of the nineteenth century consumption, also called "phthysis", was one of the most dreaded illnesses along with cancer. It was not known then however that scrofula was related to phthisis or consumption. The term white plague was used by Oliver Wendall Holmes, an American physician and writer, in in comparing the enormity of the epidemic to other severe plagues of the time. On a winter evening in when Keats was returning to his home in Hampstead Heath from London, he felt ill and immediately went to bed.
He suddenly coughed blood onto his pillow and said to his friend John Arbuthnot Brown,. It is arterial blood, I cannot be deceived by its colour. It is my death warrant. I must die. In while they were having dinner, Virginia had a sudden coughing fit and haemoptysis and Poe remarked :. Emily, her four sisters, and her brother Branwell died in young adulthood from tuberculosis, and their mother also died of tuberculosis.
Consequently it was sometimes thought, especially in areas of the world where such folklore abound such as New England in America and Yorkshire in northern Britain, that people seen to be suffering from what were actually symptoms of tuberculosis, the wasting and extreme pallor, were victims of vampires or were vampires themselves. There were certain social conditions that were intimately associated with the disease, linked to the industrial revolution at the time — poverty, malnutrition, and overcrowding.
Conditions for the working classes were extremely poor. From the beginning of the 19th century physicians debated in earnest two important questions about the pathological foundations of phthisis — firstly whether it was infectious, hereditary, or cancer, and secondly, whether scrofula, tubercles, and phthisis were separate disease entities or manifestations of the one disease.
By the 18th century many Italian physicians had come to believe that phthisis was infectious, although many British and American physicians at the time did not, and avoided doing autopsies on patients who had died from phthisis to protect themselves and their students.
In Philipp Friedrich Hermann Klencke, a German physician, successfully inoculated rabbits with material from a tubercle although he believed the disease to be cancer. Villemin had observed that soldiers stationed for long times in barracks were more likely to have phthisis than soldiers in the field, and healthy army recruits from the country often became consumptive within a year or two of taking up their posts.
Villemin thought that phthisis was similar to glanders, an infectious disease in horses. Villemin used the term tuberculose in and in Robert Koch used the term tuberkulose , translated to English as tuberculosi s, describing his discovery of the bacterium he called Tubercle bacillus , after which the disease was known as either tuberculosis or TB. Tuberculosis is still a major public health problem today, in , 8.
Submit your article Author Information. References Herzog H. History of tuberculosis. Respiration ; Daniel TM. The history of tuberculosis. Resp Med ; Tuberculosis: from an untreatable disease in antiquity to an untreatable disease in modern times.
J Anc Dis Prev Rem ; 1 2 : Dormandy T. London: The Hambledon Press, , p. Dubos R, Dubos J. The duration of active tuberculosis from onset to cure or death is approximately three years.
Common symptoms would include chest pain, fever, night sweats, severe weight loss, a prolonged cough producing sputum or occasionally, blood. In many people, consumption was characterised by a time of symptoms, interspersed with periods of remission.
Consumption was so prevalent in the 19 th century that it played a large role in literature, art and opera. It became romanticised in society by poets such as Keats, Shelley and Byron. Ironically, many of these names ultimately succumbed to the disease themselves. In some situations, the deaths of characters were portrayed as romantic, despite being anything but glamorous.
In addition to the symptoms described above, consumptive patients often took on a thin, pale, melancholy appearance that some found attractive. The imagery of the consumptive was also used in the 19 th century to describe the look of vampires and their victims.
Consequently, it was sometimes thought that people suffering from the symptoms of tuberculosis, were the victims of vampires or, indeed, were vampires themselves. During the 19 th century, there were no reliable treatments for tuberculosis. Some physicians prescribed bleedings and purgings with emetics or enemas. Most often, however, doctors could only advise their patients to rest, eat well, and exercise outdoors.
Very few recovered. Those who survived their first bout of the disease were haunted by severe recurrences that destroyed any hope for an active life. Physicians recognised the benefits of breathing clean air. Patients were sometimes moved to mountainous areas in the hope they would be cured. In the early days, however, cures were seldom seen. The first recorded treatment for consumption was developed in the early 19th century.
English physician James Carson demonstrated that injecting air into the pleural cavity could collapse a lung and permit it to heal. The practice, however, seems to have been ahead of its time and was not initially adopted. The first widely practiced treatment for consumption was to exile patients to the sanatorium.
After a student with consumption, Hermann Bremer, was told by his doctor to find a healthier climate. When a trip to the Himalayas cured his disease, he returned to Germany and studied medicine before he opened an in-patient hospital in Gorbersdorf.
Surrounded by fir trees, the hospital plied patients with good nutrition and exposed them to continuous fresh air.
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