Volume 41, Number 10 · May 26, 1994
The White Plague
By M.F. Perutz
The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won—and Lost
by Frank Ryan
Little, Brown, 460 pp., $24.95
Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History
by Sheila M. Rothman
Basic Books, 319 pp., $25.00
Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the 'Immigrant Menace'
by Alan M. Kraut
Basic Books, 369 pp., $25.00
What did Cardinal Richelieu, Heinrich Heine, Frédéric Chopin, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, and Eleanor Roosevelt have in common? They all died of tuberculosis because the treatments available until about fifty years ago probably did little to prolong sufferers' lives. Ryan's story of the discovery of the antibiotics and other agents used against tuberculosis makes as exciting reading as Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters, which must have lured more idealistic young people into medical research than any other book ever written. In earlier times a clean, mild climate was often prescribed, but Chopin wrote ruefully from his villa in Mallorca:
Review, 5451 words
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