The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society

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Rutgers University Press, 1987 - Health & Fitness - 277 pages

In 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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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

Infection and Disease
111
The Evaluation of Therapeutic Procedures
131
Index
265
Copyright

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Page 17 - He has outsoared the shadow of our night; Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain; Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn, With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
Page 7 - Put on with holy prayers : and 'tis spoken, To the succeeding royalty he leaves The healing benediction. With this strange virtue, He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy ; And sundry blessings hang about his throne, That speak him full of grace.
Page 46 - THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the year On the earth her deathbed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying. Come, months, come away, From November to May, In your saddest array; Follow the bier Of the dead cold year, And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre. The chill rain is falling, the...
Page 18 - Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear...
Page 14 - When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, [so] that I am in a very little time annihilated — not only among men ; it would be the same in a nursery of children.
Page 46 - THE melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead ; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread ; The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day. Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers...
Page 45 - O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing...
Page 18 - My health has been materially worse. My feelings at intervals are of a deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present themselves to me with microscopic distinctness.
Page 85 - I have been able to hear very plainly the beating of a man's heart ; and it is common to hear the motion of the wind to and fro in the guts and other small vessels : the stopping in the lungs is easily discovered by the wheezing.