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Tuberculosis was the most common cause of death in the United States during the nineteenth century. The lingering illness devastated the lives of patients and families, and by the turn of the century, fears of infectiousness compounded their anguish. Historians have usually focused on the changing medical knowledge of tuberculosis or on the social campaigns to combat it. In Bargaining for Life, Barbara Bates documents the human story by chronicling how men and women attempted to cope with the illness, get treatment, earn their living, and maintain social relationships.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction : Tuberculosis as a different kind of disease
• Disease and the agrarian order : tuberculosis before Koch
• Coping with Koch's challenges : bacteria, biologics, and the economy of disease, 1880-1915
• Spit and polish : the middle-class crusade to build resistance, 1900-1925
• Medicine, science, and the national interest : American responses to the BCG vaccine in the 1920s
• For cows, boys, and Indians : North American trials of BCG, 1924-1946
• "Not a substitute for approved hygienic measures" : BCG and the postwar campaign against tuberculosis
• Conclusion : Restoring history to understand the resurgence of tuberculosis.

Consider two polar images of the same medical condition: the pale and fragile Camille ensconced on a chaise in a Victorian parlour, 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 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-19th century. Although medically the two terms described the same disease of the lungs, Ott shows that "tuberculosis" and "consumption" were diagnozed, 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 eternal 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 privides insight into people's understanding of illness and how to combat it. "Fevered Lives" underscores the shifting meanings of consumption/tuberculosis in this cultural history.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Before AIDS, few Americans though much about the possibility that they might contract a disease that would inexorably weaken them and dramatically shorten their lives, but for much of American history, most families faced such a catastrophe. A multi-generational social history of a disease now making an alarming comeback, this book spans 150 years, and tells the story of tuberculosis from the vantage point not of doctors and hospitals, but of patients and communities. It shows how the settlement of several Western cities, notably Colorado Springs and Pasadena, came out of a common perception equating health and the outdoor life. Sheila M. Rothman is the co-author of "The Willowbrook Wars".
(source: Nielsen Book Data)