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 Publisher's Weekly Review
Accessible scientific and sociological history are combined by Dormandy, a consultant pathologist in London, in this account of a tenacious disease that has claimed victims from ancient Egypt to 1990s New York City. Focusing mostly on western Europe and the U.S., Dormandy vividly details the long struggle against tuberculosis. He takes readers through the high points of its history--from the discovery in 1882, by German physician Robert Koch, of the tubercle bacillus through the legendary tubercular deaths of writers, musicians and artists like Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence and Modigliani. He notes that before 1882, most observers thought infection was caused by a genetic predisposition, and doctors often treated it with measures such as bloodletting (which, Dormandy argues, hastened the deaths of famous sufferers like poet John Keats). Then he follows the disease as it made its way through crowded, poverty-stricken urban areas. He discusses the growth of the 19th century's sanatorium movement, examines the romantic, creative aura that was associated with it, and takes note of the post-WWII discovery and use of antibiotics, which began to effect dramatic cures. Dormandy points his research at present-day medical struggles--the global HIV epidemic, he notes, has combined with the emergence of multi-drug resistance to make tuberculosis, once thought almost eradicated, a threat to worldwide health again. Prodigious research and an engaging anecdotal style blend to make this a fascinating foray into the history of medicine. Illustrations and b&w photos. Editor, Niko Pfund. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
British pathologist Dormandy weaves together cultural and medical history with the skill of a learned, witty, and humane scholar. Exhaustively researched and documented, his book describes the havoc wreaked by tuberculosis over millennia--which, horrifyingly, was sometimes inflicted by physicians themselves. Happily, the search for a cure led also to significant medical innovations, including the stethoscope, antibiotics, and X-rays. More mundane advances, including park benches, bobbed hair, and an end to ornate Victorian d‚cor, also emerged, as an appalling number of citizens of all social classes sought cures in sanatoria, where carefully calibrated exercise was a standard prescription and dust was relentlessly suppressed. Dormandy illuminates his medical history through the stories of dozens of artists and writers, from Keats and Chopin to Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, and Vivien Leigh, whose lives were tragically shortened before effective antibiotics became available in the 1940s and 1950s. Sadly, however, TB's protean bacteria quickly began to mutate into drug-resistant strains, and the search for a permanent cure or effective vaccine continues. Strongly recommended for serious readers in all libraries.--Kathleen Arsenault, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
