Tag: Tuberculosis
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Patrick Branwell Brontë (1817–1848): A tale of aspiration and decline
JMS PearceHull, England On the bleak, rocky, windswept Yorkshire moors is the famous Brontës’ parsonage of St Michael and All Angels’ Church, Haworth. Here the celebrated Brontë sisters wrote their varied poetry and tales of romance, repressed passions, and frustrated love. This year (2017) marks 200 years since the birth of their brother, Patrick Branwell…
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Reflections on early 20th century tuberculosis: a juxtaposition of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Edward L. Trudeau’s Autobiography
Gregory RuteckiCleveland, Ohio, United States The early twentieth century was an auspicious time for medicine. Physicians of the era would be the first to transform the mysterious “captain of all these men of death” into a living, “breathing” bacillus named Mycobacterium tuberculosis.1 As a corollary of the fundamental discovery, diagnostic and therapeutic innovations began in…
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Sunday Sally Rose
Matthew KinsellaBrowns Mills, New Jersey, United States As the new triage nurse on the City Department Of Homeless Services Street Outreach Team, I could observe at first, orient, get my bearings. Well acquainted with the stark reality of life on the street, my three interdisciplinary teammates explained the “proper etiquette” as we traveled behind the…
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Consumption, Collapse, and Family by Alice Neel
Gregory Rutecki “The personal images in Alice Neel’s work not only reflect her life, they also provide metaphors …There is no peace…in (her) paintings, only agitated recognition of inevitable struggles.”1 “…Alice Neel described the 20th Century as she experienced it, living in the ghetto with those against whom most of society discriminated. She has provided…
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Tuberculosis—A journey across time
Mindy Schwartz Introduction Few diseases have captured the imagination more than tuberculosis (TB). Tuberculosis fascinates many people – scientists and epidemiologists, artists and humanitarians, sociologists and physicians. It is as much the stuff of art and song as a merciless killer of the young and old. Even its name conjures the image of the waif…
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Chance in the origins of antibiotics
William KingstonDublin, Ireland The discovery of antibiotics has been described as the “domestication of microorganisms” and ranks in importance with the domestication of animals as part of settled agriculture about 10,000 years ago. It depends upon antagonism between bacteria, which had been noticed as early as 1874, and Pasteur commented then that if we could…
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Jane Austen and the hypochondriacs
George DuneaChicago, Illinois, United States Jane Austen began working on Sanditon in January of 1817, completing only 2,600 words before she died six months later—probably from adrenal failure (Addison’s disease) caused by tuberculosis. The fragment was published in part in 1870, then in its entirety in 1925. Several authors since then have completed the story,…
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Anton Chekhov and the Sakhalin Penal Colony
Michael BloorUnited Kingdom In the nineteenth century the Czarist Government wanted to create an Arctic Australia by establishing a penal colony on Sakhalin Island, off the eastern coast of Siberia some five thousand miles from European Russia. There convicts who had served out their sentences would be obliged to stay as settlers, albeit in a…
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Where no birds sing: tuberculosis in Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
Putzer HungSt. Louis, Missouri, United States O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,Alone and palely loitering?The sedge has wither’d from the lake,And no birds sing. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!So haggard and so woe-begone?The squirrel’s granary is full,And the harvest’s done. I see a lily on thy browWith anguish moist and fever dew,And on thy…