By the dawn of the nineteenth century, the disease had killed one in seven of all people that had ever lived.
That is a statement that will catch one’s attention. I heard it at the opening of a recent edition of American Experience. The disease in question is tuberculosis, or, as we often read in genealogical records, phthisis, a Greek word translated into English as consumption—so called because the victim seemed to be consumed from within. I’ve seen it as the cause in many a death record. In fact, at its worst in the nineteenth century, it seems to have been the cause of death for 1 in 4 Europeans.
I grew up in a household where medical discussions were common. My mother was a nurse and every Sunday we traveled a few blocks to have dinner with her parents, and Grandma was a retired doctor. So when I called my folks the other day and my mom answered it was natural to mention watching a show about TB and asked if she’d seen it. Yes, she’d watched but my dad had refused. As far as I know, my dad has only refused to watch a documentary once before. He’d refused to watch Ken Burn’s The War, saying that he had lived through those years and didn’t feel like reliving them, so I immediately understood why he had refused to watch this documentary.
When my dad was a baby, his grandmother had moved in with the family when she and her second husband had become too ill to care for each other. I’ve heard stories about cloths over mouths and how his mother had boiled the dishes every night to try to prevent the infection from spreading. One of my aunts took her grandmother for nightly walks to get some fresh air when she was unlikely to encounter healthy people. She died of TB at home when my dad was two.
Years later, my father developed tuberculosis and began a long stay in a sanatorium. The regime at a TB sanatorium was constant bed rest, fresh air no matter the weather and enough food to prevent the wasting away that gave consumption its name. My father has told me several times about how while he was at the sanatorium, they received their first supply of streptomycin, the miracle cure that meant that people with tuberculosis could be cured. He also told me how his initial excitement over the prospect of getting well and leaving the sanatorium changed when it became clear that streptomycin made him so horribly sick that tuberculosis was preferable. Instead of being one of the first to be cured of TB with antibiotics, he was one of the last to recover from tuberculosis the nineteenth century way, month after month of forced rest and fresh air in a sanatorium. So that is a bit of my personal past, brought to mind by my father’s refusal to watch a documentary.