Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History

Rothman's involving social history of tuberculosis is built around patients' own narratives reconstructed from diaries, letters and memoirs. For example, we meet Deborah Fiske (1806-1844), a deeply religious Massachusetts teacher who submitted to God's will even as she desperately tried to prepare her two daughters for their future as orphans; she also joined a support group of tubercular women who read medical texts and pooled their knowledge. Testimonies by patients confined to sanatoriums seethe with shame and anger at being stigmatized. Other health-seekers migrated westward from the 1840s to the 1920s, lured by physicians in California or Colorado touting their region as a curative Eden. In an alarming epilogue, Rothman, a scholar at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, notes that TB is again becoming a scourge with new strains proving resistant to drugs. Illustrated. First serial to Mirabella. (Feb.)