Tuberculosis Awareness Quotes

True pain can only come gradually. It is exactly like tuberculosis in that the disease has already progressed to a critical stage before the patient becomes aware of its symptoms.

Try yoga! Think about the good stuff! Keep yourself engaged! It’s all in your mind! Duh! It is! But is more of a chemical imbalance! I don’t know why people don’t take mental ailments as normal. People are accepting of AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis, etc. But mental ailments? They are just all in the mind!

Women with consumption were believed to become more beautiful, ethereal, and wondrously pure. As Charlotte Brontë put it in a letter she wrote as her sister was dying of the disease, “Consumption, I am aware, is a flattering malady.” Patients with active tuberculosis typically become pale and thin with rosy cheeks and wide sunken eyes due to the low blood oxygenation and fevers that often accompany the disease, and these all became signals of beauty and value in Europe and the United States. Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal, “Disease and decay are often beautiful—like the pearly tear of the shellfish or the hectic glow of consumption.” Phthisis was deeply associated with feminine beauty in Northern Europe. Small, waifish bodies can now seem so associated with beauty (and health!) that it can feel innate or instinctual to find smaller bodies more attractive than larger ones. But that’s not inherent to humanity (and indeed was not a significant bias of humanity until relatively recently). That said, it’s important to note that the idealization of the small body did not mean the end of consumptive stigmatization. Once again, we see the commingling of romance and stigma in the way women’s bodies are imagined, sometimes within a single sentence, as when one eighteenth-century magazine extolled the virtues of a consumptive body type: “The beauty of women is greatly owing to their delicacy, or weakness.” One romantic word to describe the beauty standard—delicacy—followed by a stigmatizing one—weakness.

Diagnostically, the dispensary provided the means to identify incipient cases of tuberculosis well before patients were aware of their condition. One way to accomplish that goal was to offer free and accessible walk-in testing during hours convenient for working people. The dispensary took case histories of everyone who came forward, examined their sputum under a microscope, carried out physical exams, and administered tuberculin tests and x-rays in order to diagnose the disease

After thousands of hours at the bedside and thousands of hours in education with my students, one thing I’ve come to understand is that of all the contagious things in a hospital—measles and tuberculosis and Covid-19—nothing is easier to catch than anxiety. It spreads faster than you can say, “I’m nervous.” And almost always, the most anxious person in the room is the last to be aware of it, even after they’ve infected everyone around them.