The Forgotten Plague

The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won - And Lost Hardcover – June 23, 1993

Author: Visit Amazon's Frank Ryan Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0316763802 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won - And Lost – June 23, 1993
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From Publishers Weekly

Writing with the current threat posed by new strains of tuberculosis in mind, Ryan, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Physicians in Britain and a member of the New York Academy of Science, has compiled a superbly documented, dramatic and alarming history of the ancient plague. Starting with the German country doctor Robert Koch in the 1880s and culminating with the development of multi-drug therapy, the author traces the chain of cures discovered in the early- and mid-1900s by an international handful of little-known researchers, vividly profiled here, many of whom worked at great risk to themselves and under wartime conditions. The last section of the book concerns the emergence, 30 years after TB's supposed extinction, of a global, multi-drug-resistant TB strain, an epidemic of billions of latent germ carriers (an estimated 219 million deaths in 1990 alone), and the possibility that TB and AIDS trigger each other. This, Ryan warns, constitutes "a synergy of terror never before seen in medical history," which will require a global strategy on the part of the entire world health and medical community. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Tuberculosis, Ryan reminds us, is not just a disease of gracefully suffering artists in period costumes. Shockingly, 1.7 billion people worldwide are infected, including 10 million Americans. Aggravated by AIDS and homelessness, new and often drug-resistant cases threaten to unleash what has been called "the greatest public health disaster since the bubonic plague." Ryan, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Physicians and a Member of the New York Academy of Sciences, narrates the history of the search for a cure of this terrifying disease. He describes both the tedious drudgery and the seemingly mystical flashes of insight of an international group of brilliant scientists, including four Nobel Prize winners. They combated a "sinister chameleon" of a disease for which cure after cure was developed, only to be discarded after TB bacteria mutated into new variations that left promising therapies apparently useless. A compelling picture of the process of scientific research as well as a troubling look at an emerging public health crisis, Ryan's book is recommended for all libraries.
- Kathy Arsenault, Univ. of South Florida, St. Petersburg
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Hardcover: 480 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1st American ed edition (June 23, 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316763802
ISBN-13: 978-0316763806
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #853,917 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Certainly the great hallmark of modern civilization is the dramatically increased ease of communication, and it is this ease of communication which has so changed the face of modern science. It is fitting, then, that Dr. Ryan begins his book with a brief history of tuberculosis leading up to Koch's epic-making lecture on 24 August 1882 announcing his discovery of the cause of tuberculosis. Towards the end of the chapter he quotes the protest of an editor at the New York Times about the delay in receiving the news in America; the editor wrote, "it is safe to say that the little pamphlet which was left to find its way through the slow mails . . . outweighed in importance and interest for the human race all the press dispatches which have been flashed under the Channel since the date of the delivery of the address - March 24."

As the book proceeds, we see the effect of the growth of the worldwide scientific establishment and the network of scientists and ideas that have led the battle against the "white plague." As fascinating and compelling as is the subject of the search for the cure for tuberculosis, I think an even more important theme of the book is just exactly how science works. We see Paul Erlich influenced by Koch's lecture and the coincidental development of the sanatorium movement. We see Selman Waksman working in soil microbiology and taking as an assistant the young René Dubos who, reading an article by Winogradsky, would drastically change his career to focus on what he described as "the biochemical unity of life" and what would come to be known as the ecology of disease and health. We see Oswald Avery (see "The Great Influenza" by John M. Barry) assisted partially by Dubos in discovering "that DNA was the wonder chemical of heredity and life.