"The Great White Plague"—Tuberculosis Before The Age Of Antibiotics

A Chronic Infectious Disease.

Pulmonary tuberculosis—also known as consumption, phthisis, or the "great white plague"—was still an insidious, chronic presence in the 1930s. The disease is caused by a tubercle bacillus, or germ, contained in the sputum coughed up by patients with tuberculosis of the lungs, and it is spread from sick to well individuals by close personal contact. After the discovery of the bacillus in 1882, doctors and the public hoped that a means could be found to kill it within the body or to immunize the individual from its threats, but this did not exist in the 1930s. In 1930 the tuberculosis mortality rate was seventy per one hundred thousand population per year. It took more lives than any other contagious disease. In 1936 the U.S. Bureau of the Census estimated that one out of every twenty-one deaths was due to tuberculosis. Its greatest toll was in young people between the ages of fifteen to forty-five,...

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