The definitive social history of tuberculosis, from its origins as a haunting mystery to its modern reemergence that now threatens populations around the world. It killed novelist George Orwell, Eleanor Roosevelt, and millions of others -- rich and poor. Desmond Tutu, Amitabh Bachchan, and Nelson Mandela survived it, just. For centuries, tuberculosis has ravaged cities and plagued the human body. In Phantom Plague, Vidya Krishnan, traces the history...

A beautifully drawn portrait of madness, and of the way in which we discover other worlds through literature.

A young engineer goes to visit his cousin at a tubercular sanatorium in the Swiss Alps intending to stay three weeks, but ends by staying on for seven years to observe the disturbed personnel and patients. The unfolding exchanges between the protagonists are meant to present a microcosm of the society of pre-World War I Europe in this dramatization based on a Nobel Prize-winning novel.

The riveting history of tuberculosis, the world's most lethal disease, the two men whose lives it tragically intertwined, and the birth of medical science.

"Consumption has ravaged Louise Pinecroft's family, leaving her and her father alone and heartbroken. But Dr. Pinecroft has plans for a revolutionary experiment: convinced that sea air will prove to be the cure his wife and children needed, he arranges to house a group of prisoners suffering from the disease in the caves beneath his new Cornish home. While he devotes himself to his controversial medical trials, Louise finds herself increasingly discomfited...

The crew of the merchant ship Narcissus rally around a critically ill fellow crewmember, James Wait, putting their lives and the fate of the ship in jeopardy. Based in part on author Joseph Conrad's experience during a voyage from Bombay to London, The Nigger of the Narcissus is considered to be one of Conrad's best works.

In the autumn of 1916, Americans are debating whether to enter the First World War. There are "preparedness parades," and headlines report German spies. But in an isolated community in the Adirondacks in upstate New York, the danger is barely felt. At Tamarack Lake the focus is on the sick. Wealthy tubercular patients live in private cure cottages; charity patients, many of them recent immigrants from Europe, fill the sanatorium.Here, in the crisp...