Tuberculosis

More historical digging requires some corrections. When Mildred’s parents died she was the oldest girl but the second born. The first born was Henry but Mildred had to provide and care for her two teenage brothers George and Frank, the youngest sister who was ten years old when Mildred’s daughter Elle was born. 

Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The bacteria usually attack the lungs, but TB bacteria can attack any part of the body such as the kidney, spine, and brain. If not treated properly, TB disease can be fatal. TB disease was once the leading cause of death in the United States.

It turned out that Henry was unable to help care for his siblings after the untimely death of his parents because he was in another part of the state where there are mountains in a sanatorium for those recovering from tuberculosis. Those afflicted with tuberculosis suffered in institutions because the disease is contagious. The White Plague or Romantic disease as it was called in previous centuries tuberculosis is caused by bacteria. Later Mildred’s sister also contracted TB and was sent to a sanatorium. These stays lasted months not days as the treatment and recovery was a very slow process. The patients where my family went in the mountains slept on porches so they would have maximum fresh air in their lungs.

“In 1890 Koch developed tuberculin, a purified protein derivative of the bacteria.^[62] It proved to be an ineffective means of immunization but in 1908, Charles Mantoux found it was an effective intradermic test for diagnosing tuberculosis.^[63]  If the importance of a disease for mankind is measured from the number of fatalities which are due to it, then tuberculosis must be considered much more important than those most feared infectious diseases, plague, cholera, and the like. Statistics have shown that 1/7 of all humans die of tuberculosis.”

—Die Ätiologie der Tuberculose, Robert Koch (1882) Wickipedia

“At the beginning of the 20th century, tuberculosis (TB) was one of the UK’s most urgent health problems. After the establishment in the 1880s that the disease was contagious, TB was made a notifiable disease in Britain; there were campaigns to stop spitting in public places, and the infected poor were pressured to enter sanatoria that resembled prisons; the sanatoria for the middle and upper classes offered excellent care and constant medical attention.^[74] Whatever the purported benefits of the fresh air and labor in the sanatoria, even under the best conditions, 50 %% of those who entered were dead within five years (1916). As the century progressed, some surgical interventions, including the pneumothorax or plombage technique—collapsing an infected lung to "rest" it and allow the lesions to heal—were used to treat tuberculosis.” Wickipedia

“Antibiotics were developed in the 1940’s that were effective in treating TB. Hopes that the disease could be completely eliminated were dashed in the 1980s with the rise of drug-resistant strains. Tuberculosis cases in Britain, numbering around 117,000 in 1913, had fallen to around 5,000 in 1987, but cases rose again, reaching 6,300 in 2000 and 7,600 cases in 2005. Due to the elimination of public health facilities in New York and the emergence of HIV, there was a resurgence of TB in the late 1980s. The number of patients failing to complete their course of drugs is high. New York had to cope with more than 20,000 TB patients with multidrug-resistant strains (resistant to, at least, both Rifampin and Isoniazid).

In response to the resurgence of tuberculosis, the World Health Organization issued a declaration of a global health emergency in 1993. Every year, nearly half a million new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) are estimated to occur worldwide.” Wickipedia Who would have ever imagined?

La Miseria by Cristóbal Rojas (1886). The author, suffering from tuberculosis, depicts the social aspect of the disease, and its relation with living conditions at the close of the nineteenth century.