Discovering Tuberculosis

Christian W. McMillen’s book is an ambitious global history of tuberculosis (TB) since 1900. ‘Writing about TB control as failure’ (p. 2), the author breaks with previous Western-centric research and covers new spatial and chronological terrain. His book comprises three parts: the first studies the impact of racial theories of susceptible ‘primitive populations’ on TB diagnosis and treatment; the second analyses the roll-out of TB control programmes involving Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccinations and antibiotics between the 1940s and 1970s; and the third part assesses the international response to the joint HIV/TB pandemic and Multidrug-Resistant TB (MDR–TB) following the late 1970s. After the introduction, which covers TB’s biology and impact, Part I addresses the popular early twentieth-century theory that ‘primitive’ indigenous populations formed susceptible ‘virgin soils’ for civilatory diseases such as TB. In the absence of systematic studies, vague concepts of racial susceptibility distracted from the effects of industrialisation and poverty on indigenous TB rates and stalled the provision of health care. The ‘virgin soils’ theory and racial explanations of TB were only gradually debunked by systematic epidemiological studies during the 1930s and 1940s. Subsequently, many, but not all, experts came to think of TB as a ‘disease of poverty’ (p. 42)

Biology · Development economics · Disease · Geography · Indigenous · Infectious disease (medical specialty · Pandemic · Pathology · Political science · Poverty · Tuberculosis · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Epidemiology · History · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine