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18 books match the query 'Tuberculosis'
Another Magic Mountain
Kibong'oto Hospital and African Tuberculosis, 1920–2000Christoph Gradmann
Ohio University Press, 2025
Kibong’oto Hospital, opened in 1926, is an East African tuberculosis treatment center located on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Its history is crucial to understanding tuberculosis in Tanzania and, more broadly, in Africa. With the hospital as a point of departure, Christoph Gradmann presents a history of this disease that engages with local and regional contexts rather than with international elite science and health policies.
The book addresses key questions about the African experience with tuberculosis:
- What did it mean to do clinical science on tuberculosis in colonial and postcolonial contexts?
- Along which trajectories did medical practice and research evolve in a place where international advances in medical science were sometimes heard of only faintly and where resources could be scarce?
- How did a large hospital with several hundred beds dedicated to the treatment of just one condition figure in the development of national and regional health systems?
- How did Kibong’oto Hospital, a pride of colonial health governance, transition after Tanzania gained independence?
- How did treating and researching tuberculosis change throughout the twentieth century in an African hospital dedicated to that condition?
- How did research at the hospital contribute to tuberculosis-control strategies on national and international levels?
The book is based on the hospital’s unique archive: its surviving library of thousands of case summaries. Since 1926, this library has documented an enormous number of patient lives, staff careers, diagnoses, treatments, clinical trials, and much more. For today’s readers, the library provides insight into a history of clinical medicine in Africa, for which very few comparable archives exist. Gradmann supplements this site-specific research with material from national and international archives, as well as interviews with former staff involved in that history. The book’s four chapters offer perspectives on colonial epidemiological research in the interwar years; on late colonial healthcare development plans and the arrival of modern drug therapies; on the role of a national tuberculosis hospital in a newly independent country; and on the history of tuberculosis control in an age of economic crisis, HIV, and emergent global health-treatment programs. Finally, Gradmann discusses what the history of a large hospital can add to today’s tuberculosis research, control policy, and historiography.
At the Limits of Cure
Bharat Jayram Venkat
Duke University Press, 2021
Children as Caregivers
The Global Fight against Tuberculosis and HIV in ZambiaHunleth, Jean
Rutgers University Press, 2017
In Zambia, due to the rise of tuberculosis and the closely connected HIV epidemic, a large number of children have experienced the illness or death of at least one parent. Children as Caregivers examines how well intentioned practitioners fail to realize that children take on active caregiving roles when their guardians become seriously ill and demonstrates why understanding children’s care is crucial for global health policy.
Using ethnographic methods, and listening to the voices of the young as well as adults, Jean Hunleth makes the caregiving work of children visible. She shows how children actively seek to “get closer” to ill guardians by providing good care. Both children and ill adults define good care as attentiveness of the young to adults’ physical needs, the ability to carry out treatment and medication programs in the home, and above all, the need to maintain physical closeness and proximity. Children understand that losing their guardians will not only be emotionally devastating, but that such loss is likely to set them adrift in Zambian society, where education and advancement depend on maintaining familial, reciprocal relationships.
View a gallery of images from the book (https://www.flickr.com/photos/childrenascaregivers)
Download the open access ebook.
City Of Plagues
Disease, Poverty, And Deviance In San FranciscoSusan Craddock
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
An eye-opening discussion of the ways disease shapes urban society
Disease may not discriminate, but it helps those who do. In this fascinating book, Susan Craddock examines the role of disease and health policy in the construction of race, gender, and class, and in urban development in nineteenth- and twentieth-century San Francisco. An absorbing look at the role of disease and health policy in the construction of race, gender, and class in urban development during nineteenth- and twentieth-century San Francisco. Susan Craddock considers tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, and syphilis as diseases whose devastations were derived in part from their use as political tools and disciplinary mechanisms
Consumed In The City
Observing Tuberculosis At Century'S EndPaul Draus
Temple University Press, 2004
Disease and Class
Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American SocietyGeorgina D. Feldberg
Rutgers University Press, 1995
Dr. Charles David Spivak
A Jewish Immigrant and the American Tuberculosis MovementJeanne Abrams
University Press of Colorado, 2009
Born in Russia in 1861, Spivak immigrated to the United States in 1882 and received his medical degree from Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College by 1890. In 1896, his wife's poor health brought them to Colorado. Determined to find a cure, Spivak became one of the most charismatic and well-known leaders in the American Tuberculosis Movement. His role as director of Denver's Jewish Consumptives' Relief Society sanatorium allowed his personal philosophies to strongly influence policies. His unique blend of Yiddishkeit, socialism, and secularism - along with his belief in treating the "whole" patient - became a model for integrating medical, social, and rehabilitation services that was copied across the country.
Not only a national leader in the crusade against tuberculosis but also a luminary in the American Jewish community, Dr. Charles Spivak was a physician, humanitarian, writer, linguist, journalist, administrator, social worker, ethnic broker, and medical, public health, and social crusader. Abrams's biography will be a welcome addition to anyone interested in the history of medicine, Jewish life in America, or Colorado history.
Making Uncertainty
Tuberculosis, Substance Use, and Pathways to Health in South AfricaAnna Versfeld
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Must We All Die?
Alaska's Enduring Struggle with TuberculosisRobert Fortuine
University of Alaska Press, 2024
Fortuine chronicles the removal of tuberculosis victims, many of them children, from their families and villages to hospitals in the Lower 48 states. He describes treatments, medical advances, and day-to-day life for the nurses, physicians, missionaries, and teachers who worked to stem the tide that killed and disabled thousands. The struggle against tuberculosis in Alaska is a story of triumph against untold suffering and crippling odds, but it is also a cautionary tale as an increasingly resistant strain of this disease has emerged in the twenty-first century.
"Must We All Die?" is an encyclopedic contribution to the history of medicine and a tribute to those who fought tuberculosis and to the Alaska Natives who endured a cruel disease that destroyed families and ravaged villages.
Nathan Straus
From Macy's Magnate to International HumanitarianAndrew Fisher
Rutgers University Press, 2026
Nathan Straus (1848–1931) encompassed worlds. He rose from his Jewish German immigrant family’s ruin in Civil War Georgia to become co-owner of Macy’s and Abraham & Straus department stores. He helped build American Zionism and cofounded the American Jewish Congress movement. His public service led to a nomination for New York City mayor.
This, the first comprehensive biography of Straus, details each of these lives but argues that his most historic achievements lay elsewhere—in philanthropy. Inspired by both his Jewish values and no-nonsense pragmatism, Straus designed, funded, and oversaw four Progressive philanthropic initiatives. The greatest—his demonstration and advocacy campaigns for milk pasteurization—saved the lives of countless thousands of infants in New York City and, ultimately, across much of America and western Europe. Straus also founded America’s first TB preventorium for at-risk children: a model for the forty-five more that followed. Partnering with Hadassah, he brought American public health innovations to Mandate Palestine. He provided vast relief for New York City’s jobless in the severe 1890s depression. In all, Straus’s humanitarianism won the acclaim of American presidents and world leaders and the gratitude of millions. We can learn from him today.
Saving Sickly Children
The Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909-1970Connolly, Cynthia A
Rutgers University Press, 2008
In this book, Cynthia A. Connolly provides a provocative analysis of public health and family welfare through the lens of the tuberculosis preventorium. This unique facility was intended to prevent TB in indigent children from families labeled irresponsible or at risk for developing the disease. Yet, it also held deeply rooted assumptions about class, race, and ethnicity. Connolly goes further to explain how the child-saving themes embedded in the preventorium movement continue to shape children's health care delivery and family policy in the United States.
Suffering in the Land of Sunshine
A Los Angeles Illness NarrativeAbel, Emily K.
Rutgers University Press, 2006
The history of medicine is much more than the story of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Seeking to understand the patient’s perspective, historians scour the archives, searching for rare personal accounts. Bringing together a trove of more than 400 family letters by Charles Dwight Willard, Suffering in the Land of Sunshine provides a unique window into the experience of sickness.
A Los Angeles civic leader at the turn of the twentieth century, Willard is well known to historians of the West, but exclusively for his public life as a booster and reformer. Willard’s evocative story offers fresh insights into several critical issues, including how concepts of gender, class, and race shape patients’ representations of their illness, how expectations of cure affect the illness experience, how different cultures constrain the coping strategies of the sick, and why robust health is such an exalted value in certain societies.
Symptoms of the Self
Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern StageRoberta Barker
University of Iowa Press, 2022
Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of the stage consumptive. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, tuberculosis was a leading killer. Its famous dramatic and operatic victims—Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux Camélias and her avatar Violetta in La Traviata, Mimì in La Bohème, Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night, to name but a few—are among the most iconic figures of the Western stage. Its classic symptoms, the cough and the blood-stained handkerchief, have become global performance shorthand for life-threatening illness.
The consumptive character became a vehicle through which standards of health, beauty, and virtue were imposed; constructions of class, gender, and sexuality were debated; the boundaries of nationhood were transgressed or maintained; and an exceedingly fragile whiteness was held up as a dominant social ideal. By telling the story of tuberculosis on the transatlantic stage, Symptoms of the Self uncovers some of the wellsprings of modern Western theatrical practice—and of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die.
The Ailing City
Health, Tuberculosis, and Culture in Buenos Aires, 1870–1950Diego Armus
Duke University Press, 2011
The Bacteriology of Tuberculosis
Egons Darzins
University of Minnesota Press, 1958
The White Plague
Tuberculosis, Man and SocietyDubos, Jean
Rutgers University Press, 1987
In The White Plague, René and Jean Dubos argue that the great increase of tuberculosis was intimately connected with the rise of an industrial, urbanized society and—a much more controversial idea when this book first appeared forty years ago—that the progress of medical science had very little to do with the marked decline in tuberculosis in the twentieth century.
The White Plague has long been regarded as a classic in the social and environmental history of disease. This reprint of the 1952 edition features new introductory writings by two distinguished practitioners of the sociology and history of medicine. David Mechanic's foreword describes the personal and intellectual experience that shaped René Dubos's view of tuberculosis. Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz's historical introduction reexamines The White Plague in light of recent work on the social history of tuberculosis. Her thought-provoking essay pays particular attention to the broader cultural and medical assumptions about sickness and sick people that inform a society’s approach to the conquest of disease.
Tuberculosis Control and Institutional Change in Shanghai, 1911–2011
Rachel S. Core
Hong Kong University Press, 2023
Tuberculosis Control and Institutional Change in Shanghai, 1911–2011 is the first book on the most widespread and deadly infectious disease in China, both historically and today. Weaving together interviews with data from periodicals and local archives in Shanghai, Rachel Core examines the rise and fall of tuberculosis control in China from the 1950s to the 1990s. Under the socialist work unit system, the vast majority of people had guaranteed employment, a host of benefits tied to their workplace, and there was little mobility—factors that made the delivery of medical and public health services possible in both urban and rural areas. The dismantling of work units amid wider market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s led to the rise of temporary and casual employment and a huge migrant worker population, with little access to health care, creating new challenges in TB control. This study of Shanghai will provide valuable lessons for historians, social scientists, public health specialists, and many others working on public health infrastructure on both the national and global levels.
Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion
A History of Public Health and Migration to Los AngelesAbel, Emily K.
Rutgers University Press, 2007
Winner of the 2008 Arthur J. Viseltear Prize from the American Public Health Association and Nominated for the 2008 William H. Welch Medal, AAHM
Though notorious for its polluted air today, the city of Los Angeles once touted itself as a health resort. After the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1876, publicists launched a campaign to portray the city as the promised land, circulating countless stories of miraculous cures for the sick and debilitated. As more and more migrants poured in, however, a gap emerged between the city’s glittering image and its dark reality.
Emily K. Abel shows how the association of the disease with “tramps” during the 1880s and 1890s and Dust Bowl refugees during the 1930s provoked exclusionary measures against both groups. In addition, public health officials sought not only to restrict the entry of Mexicans (the majority of immigrants) during the 1920s but also to expel them during the 1930s.
Abel’s revealing account provides a critical lens through which to view both the contemporary debate about immigration and the U.S. response to the emergent global tuberculosis epidemic.