Famous Tuberculosis Quotes

A major reason is that the campaign began with no knowledge of the fact that there are multiple strains of M. tuberculosis and that the efficacy of BCG is strain-specific, varying from Aronson’s famous 80 percent to nil.

Robert Koch, a pioneering figure of the modern germ theory of disease (Chapter 12). In 1882 he identified Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and he established rigorous proof—in compliance with his own famous postulates—of its causative role in the disease.

The mostly white medical establishment in the U.S., meanwhile, tended to focus on so-called “race susceptibility,” the idea that something inherent in the genetics of Black people caused tuberculosis—a kind of spes phthisica for the infectious age. Some white doctors even argued that the “susceptibility” was caused by the end of slavery in the U.S. In his famous 1896 essay “The Effects of Emancipation upon the Mental and Physical Health of the Negro of the South,” Dr. J. F. Miller argued (falsely) that tuberculosis was a “rare” disease “among the negroes of the South prior to emancipation.” In truth, the disease was “rare” because enslaved people had no access to diagnosis and lived in a world where white physicians presumed that consumption among Black people was either uncommon or impossible. But Miller instead argued the real cause of the disease was that “even now, after thirty years or more of freedom, he [the Black person] takes but little thought for to-morrow, but to-morrow, nevertheless, comes to him and oftimes finds him wholly unprepared to meet its exacting demands.” Miller argued the only way to restore Black people to health was to return to the institution of slavery.