Review by Choice Review
As the AIDS epidemic continues, books on more historic, difficult to control, epidemic diseases continue to be published in great numbers. Tuberculosis is an especial favorite. When Tony Gould's A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors was published (CH, Feb'96), this reviewer believed that the ultimate book on the scourge had been written for this generation. Then along came The White Death. Though not as detailed and inclusive as A Summer Plague, White Death is more compelling because of its emphasis on people: some common folk, many celebrities, all their fates leveled by tuberculosis. The disease, for example, killed Charlotte Bront"e, her sisters, and her brother; Chopin; Robert Louis Stevenson; and D.H. Lawrence. We learn the details of their illness and how it affected their lives. Dormandy is a master of the anecdote, and he is able to use them to move his narrative along. Through anecdotes, we learn of the rise and fall of the tuberculosis sanatorium and the promise of modern medicine. Based on extensive research and well written, his is an exemplar of modern medical history, and it should be available to the general reader as well as the specialist and the practitioner. All levels. ; Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
