Tuberculosis

by

Christoph Gradmann

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0034

Introduction

Being an age-old disease, tuberculosis (TB) has not one but several histories, reflecting the development of its epidemiology across different species, of different measures employed for its control, of its role in the development of health care institutions, of its presumptive vanishing in high-income countries during the twentieth century, and of its return to attention around 1990. The historiography is rich, and ultimately its wide scope is driven not just by the magnitude of the condition that at the time of writing kills about 1.5 million people every year globally, but also by the chronic character of tuberculosis. The condition leaves deep biographical traces in its sufferers, it has a tendency to create specialized institutions, it has been specifically addressed by public health since the nineteenth century, and today it is one of the big three infectious killers highest on the agenda of global health. Owing to all this, tuberculosis has been a condition that is popular with historians, not least because in comparison to other epidemic infectious diseases, rich archives exist. The downside of this vastness is a somewhat disorganized historiography where books that cover all of these histories are missing and what one wants to consult depends on interest. Also, the historiography centers on North America and Europe and little is known about older histories of tuberculosis outside of these regions. However, we can presume that these other histories are different from the condition’s history in Europe and North America, which, after all, was a history of a condition’s fundamental decline in high-income countries. Such a decline did not happen in low-income countries for a long time. What we know about the history of tuberculosis outside of high-income countries tends to sail under the heading of international or global health.

General Histories

A good way to start serious scholarship is by reading the masterful monograph Dubos and Dubos 1987. Written with a vast knowledge and with a holistic interest in the subject’s history, it is still unsurpassed as an introduction to the older history of tuberculosis. Add to this the histories Smith 1987, which is, unlike the title might make one suspect, very good on the history of treatment, and Bryder 1988, which opened views on the social history that, strangely enough in a social disease, had been long ignored. Bynum 2012 is a more recent history of tuberculosis that gives attention to its history in international health and its return to attention from the 1980s.

• Bryder, Linda. Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Britain. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

  A book that made for a healthy change in the historiography that too long had focused too much on patient lives in sanatoria for the rich and their families. Outstanding as a social history of a social disease.

• Bynum, Helen. Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

  Currently the best accessible introduction to the history of tuberculosis, covering it from antiquity to global health. A very good inroad for students.

• Dubos, René Jules, and Jean Dubos. The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

  The book that established the history of tuberculosis as a serious field of study. Written with comprehensive interest and skill, it is unsurpassed as an introduction to the condition’s history from the eighteenth century to 1950. Originally published 1952.

• Smith, Francis Barrymore. The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950. London: Croom Helm, 1987.

  This book’s great virtue lies in following the process of tuberculosis control in its centrality in health services and public health around 1900 and in faithfully reviewing all the therapeutic fashions of the pre-antibiotic age.