TB

“Tuberculosis was not a single disease caused by a common germ. This strange disease was the leviathan that dominated every medical discipline and department throughout the world. In every field of medicine, whole subcultures had evolved to fight against it, each in its way a distinct theatre of war. For the ear, nose and throat surgeons it was the disease that infested the throat and the voice box, slowly infiltrating, ulcerating and destroying the delicate membranes of speech, making it an agony even to whisper. For the abdominal surgeon it was the disease that so often followed the throat infection, whether as a primary invader that ulcerated, scarred and destroyed the bowel, ruining its digestive ability and leading to progressive emaciation, or, secondary to the well-known lung disease, as the late complication of unrelievable diarrhea and vomiting, so often the harbinger of a fatal outcome. For the gynecologist it was the insidious infiltration that destroyed the fallopian tubes and ovaries, engulfing the fine tissues of motherhood in a deformed and distorted mass of inflammation and thick cheesy pus, robbing the young woman, should she survive, of her opportunity for a family. For the orthopedic surgeon it was the common cause of suppurating arthritis of childhood, the slow incurable torment that destroyed the hip joints, the shoulders, the elbows, knees, invading the long bones of the legs and arms, to cripple children, or to collapse the tender spines of millions of young people into the characteristic hunchbacks. “From meningitis to infections within the eye or the ear, from lupus of the skin to the manifold horrors of consumption in the lungs, tuberculosis was the protean and omnipresent menace. Not a country, a race, or a people in the world escaped its thrall” (F. Ryan, 308-309).