‘The Forgotten Plague’ Review: How TB Changed America
By the beginning of the 19th
century, tuberculosis had killed one in seven of all the people who’d ever
lived.
By John Anderson in the Wall Street Journal
The
Forgotten Plague
This writer’s great-grandmother died
of tuberculosis. So did her 26-year-old son. Several of her infant children
died of diphtheria. Her granddaughter (my mother) contracted encephalitis as a
consequence of mumps. The point of this isn’t family history, but that these
were not extraordinary events from a very ancient time. Diseases now considered
anachronisms once slew people in droves.
“The Forgotten Plague,” a title that
carries no small amount of irony, refers to TB, or “consumption,” to put a
romantic spin on it, which could take decades to claim its victim and had, by
the beginning of the 19th century, killed one in seven of all the people who’d
ever lived. Until its resurgence at the height of the AIDS epidemic, TB itself
was considered an artifact. Much like the measles.
The warhorse series that is
“American Experience,” which is presenting”The Forgotten Plague,” has, over the
years, ticked down a list of people, places and things that have made a
difference to American life. American death has never really gotten equal time.
(Robert Kenner’s “Influenza 1918” aired in 1998; “The Great Fever,” the Adriana
Bosch-Michael Chin film on yellow fever, aired in 2006.) While the timing of
“Plague” is purely serendipitous, the fact that it arrives during our
politically charged antivaxxer controversy makes “American Experience” more
urgent than it’s been in years. Director Chana Gazit doesn’t stray much from
the standard “AE” formula, but she does have a potent story.
It begins, after some historic
prelude, with Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, who lost a daughter to the
so-called “wasting disease” and contracted it himself. But he found that when
he got out of the city, where TB seemed to flourish, and into the Adirondacks
of New York state, the cold fresh air seemed to thwart the disease. People had
similar results in the dry atmosphere of the Southwest, but Trudeau founded his
sanitarium at Saranac Lake, initiating what would be a tuberculosis industry.
The role TB played in the
development of America is the fascinating part of “The Forgotten Plague,” which
avails itself of a wealth of archival photography and interviews, some with the
Trudeau sanitarium’s surviving patients. When the German microbiologist Robert
Koch discovered in the late 1800s that tuberculosis was contagious, it altered
life in very basic ways. Handkerchief sales went way up. Cities that seemed to
offer hope—Los Angeles, for instance—no longer welcomed the sick. Beards went
out of fashion, and guilt was in vogue: The idea that TB simply ran in families
was one thing; that a mother had given it to her child was quite another. It’s
an awful thought. And one that “The Forgotten Plague” makes impossible not to
think about.
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