Tuberculosis

Being an age-old disease, tuberculosis (TB) has not one but several histories, reflecting the development of its epidemiology across different species, of different measures employed for its control, of its role in the development of health care institutions, of its presumptive vanishing in high-income countries during the twentieth century, and of its return to attention around 1990. The historiography is rich, and ultimately its wide scope is driven not just by the magnitude of the condition that at the time of writing kills about 1.5 million people every year globally, but also by the chronic character of tuberculosis. The condition leaves deep biographical traces in its sufferers, it has a tendency to create specialized institutions, it has been specifically addressed by public health since the nineteenth century, and today it is one of the big three infectious killers highest on the agenda of global health. Owing to all this, tuberculosis has been a condition that is popular with historians, not least because in comparison to other epidemic infectious diseases, rich archives exist. The downside of this vastness is a somewhat disorganized historiography where books that cover all of these histories are missing and what one wants to consult depends on interest. Also, the historiography centers on North America and Europe and little is known about older histories of tuberculosis outside of these regions. However, we can presume that these other histories are different from the condition’s history in Europe and North America, which, after all, was a history of a condition’s fundamental decline in high-income countries. Such a decline did not happen in low-income countries for a long time. What we know about the history of tuberculosis outside of high-income countries tends to sail under the heading of international or global health.