Product Description

Consider two polar images of the same medical condition: the pale and fragile Camille ensconced on a chaise in a Victorian parlor, daintily coughing a small spot of blood onto her white lace pillow, and a wretched poor man in a Bowery flophouse spreading a dread and deadly infection. Now Katherine Ott chronicles how in one century a romantic, ambiguous affliction of the spirit was transformed into a disease that threatened public health and civic order. She persuasively argues that there was no constant identity to the disease over time, no "core" tuberculosis.

What we understand today as pulmonary tuberculosis would have been largely unintelligible to a physician or patient in the late nineteenth century. Although medically the two terms described the same disease of the lungs, Ott shows that "tuberculosis" and "consumption" were diagnosed, defined, and treated distinctively by both lay and professional health workers. Ott traces the shift from the pre-industrial world of 1870, in which consumption was conceived of primarily as a middle-class malaise that conferred virtue, heightened spirituality, and gentility on the sufferer, to the post-industrial world of today, in which tuberculosis is viewed as a microscopic enemy, fought on an urban battleground and attacking primarily the outcast poor and AIDS patients.

Ott's focus is the changing definition of the disease in different historical eras and environments. She explores its external trappings, from the symptoms doctors chose to notice (whether a pale complexion or a tubercle in a dish) to the significance of the economic and social circumstances of the patient. Emphasizing the material culture of disease--medical supplies, advertisements for faraway rest cures, outdoor sick porches, and invalid hammocks--Ott provides insight into people's understanding of illness and how to combat it. Fevered Lives underscores the shifting meanings of consumption/tuberculosis in an extraordinarily readable cultural history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1660400 in Books
• Published on: 1996-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Historian of science, medicine and society at the Smithsonian, Ott gathers threads from cultural history, politics, social commentary and medicine in her consideration of the history of tuberculosis. Her narrative is an uncomfortable reminder that the practice of medicine has always been fallible. The parallels of last century's tuberculosis epidemic with this century's AIDS epidemic are unmistakable and are drawn explicitly in the final chapter, which deals with the current "reemergence" of tuberculosis and its intersection with AIDS. After Robert Koch (in 1882) demonstrated that a bacillus was the cause of tuberculosis, the romanticized "consumption" was metamorphosed into a feared epidemic disease. As Ott weaves her story of tuberculosis from the lives of those afflicted by it and the society that felt compelled to battle it, flashes of insight emerge: Why the dark, plush, musty Victorian interiors were replaced by bright, spare, ventilated "modern homes." How medical education was transformed in the early 1900s. Although generally objective, in the final chapter Ott allows herself some politically correct grandstanding. A few minor medical misconceptions crop up in the narrative. Extensive references accompany each chapter, making this an excellent resource as well as an interesting read.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Ott, an historian at the Smithsonian Institution, explores the changing cultural meanings of tuberculosis, supplementing the science-centered narrative of Frank Ryan's The Forgotten Plague (LJ 5/15/93). As Ott points out, 19th-century popular culture idealized "consumptives" as spiritual and artistic. Following Robert Koch's 1882 discovery of the tuberculosis bacterium, patients were urged to surrender their lives to medical experts' spartan and regimented cures. The recent emergence of drug-resistant tuberculosis in impoverished and isolated urban risk groups and the high-tech medical and scientific practice that attempts to identify and treat it has resulted in yet another metaphoric conceptualization. Ott's narrative expands Sheila Rothman's Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (LJ 1/94) by examining the changes in material culture?the scientific instruments, sick room equipment, and treatment facilities?that evolved as the germ theory of disease and the discovery of antibiotics transformed medical practice. Her work is a rewarding medical history. Recommended for scholarly and larger public libraries.?Kathleen Arsenault, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Ott examines the social, political, medical, and scientific ramifications of tuberculosis during the past 125 years. She discusses perceived causes of the disease, the role of germ theory in apprehending the truth, and finally the modern situation of the disease. She emphasizes the small number of patients who actually went to sanitariums, as opposed to the high visibility of those institutions, and she examines presentations of tuberculosis in nonmedical literature and the arts. She shows that at first many lay people romanticized the tubercular but that the general sentiment now is that they are dangerous and somehow to blame for their disease. In addition, the current lack of historical perspective in the discussion of and the treatment for tuberculosis portends that problems of the past may recur. Sixty pages of notes and references add to the value of Ott's work, and well-chosen illustrations enhance it throughout. William Beatty