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. |
From inside the book
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... symptoms and the necessary bacterial origin of every tubercular infection . These parallel histories , the first examining the complex social environment that generated the conditions of disease , and the second celebrating the growth ...
... symptoms of tuberculosis became evident the disease was entrenched and resisted treatment . The new antibiotics could promise no cure when it came to tuberculosis . Earlier in the decade , Dr. Selman Waksman , Dubos's mentor , had ...
... symptoms and their complex evolution ; nonetheless , we expect a professional diagnosis to uncover the characteristic stig- mata of the disease , and to predict its likely outcome . Not even a well - trained physician would diagnose ...
... symptoms that called at- tention to differences among the sick . Medical care of tubercular patients traditionally took special account of personal habits and housing , and advice on how to live long and well despite a family history of ...
... symptoms . The author poured out his indignation over this ignorance about the conditions in which tuberculosis might prove dangerous , but somehow the section of his book on " Races and Peoples " was left unaffected . After reporting ...
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 |