The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and SocietyIn The White Plague, René and Jean Dubos argue that the great increase of tuberculosis was intimately connected with the rise of an industrial, urbanized society and--a much more controversial idea when this book first appeared forty years ago--that the progress of medical science had very little to do with the marked decline in tuberculosis in the twentieth century. The White Plague has long been regarded as a classic in the social and environmental history of disease. This reprint of the 1952 edition features new introductory writings by two distinguished practitioners of the sociology and history of medicine. David Mechanic's foreword describes the personal and intellectual experience that shaped René Dubos's view of tuberculosis. Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz's historical introduction reexamines The White Plague in light of recent work on the social history of tuberculosis. Her thought-provoking essay pays particular attention to the broader cultural and medical assumptions about sickness and sick people that inform a society's approach to the conquest of disease. |
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... remained terribly destructive — the most frequent cause of death or disability during the critical ages of fifteen through forty - five . ' During that time , the uncertainties of treatment also 1. In 1900 , annual death rates from ...
... remained the ac- cepted determinant of who would become ill . As a result , the combination of widespread lung disease and variable mortality rates stimulated studies of the patterns of mortality that would identify an individual's ...
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Contents
The Captain of All the Men of Death | 3 |
Death Warrant for Keats | 11 |
Flight from the North Winds | 18 |
Contagion and Heredity | 28 |
Consumption and the Romantic Age | 44 |
Phthisis Consumption and Tubercles | 69 |
Percussion Auscultation and the Unitarian Theory of Phthisis | 77 |
The Germ Theory of Tuberculosis | 94 |
Treatment and Natural Resistance | 139 |
Drugs Vaccines and Public Health Measures | 154 |
Healthy Living and Sanatoria | 173 |
The Evolution of Epidemics | 185 |
Tuberculosis and Industrial Civilization | 197 |
Tuberculosis and Social Technology | 208 |
Appendices | 229 |
Bibliography and Notes | 235 |