The White Plague and its Treatment

Like the common cold and influenza, it is a social disease, since the bacillus is transmitted by droplets carried through the air and in infected sputum. Carriers of the bacillus are generally unaware of its presence and show no symptoms of overt tuberculosis. They may, however, be identified by the tuberculin test, invented by Robert Koch in 1890. This involves impregnation of the skin with a small amount of heat-inactivated bacillus and observing the formation of a classic immune response. 

Initial infection occurs when bacilli are taken up into the airways of the lungs. Here, they attract the attention of white blood cells, mainly phagocytes and macrophages, which engulf the bacilli but do not manage to kill them. 

Descriptions of the disease appear in the writings of almost every culture. John Bunyan, writing in the 17th century, claimed (in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman) that  

The captain of all these men of death that came against him to take him away, 

At that time, the disease probably caused about one-quarter of all deaths in England. The poets and writers of the so-called Romantic Age often seemed to be almost resigned to their fate. Keats mentions the symptoms in his poem Ode to a nightingale  

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