Search -
The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis
The White Death A History of Tuberculosis Author:Thomas Dormandy "One of the most readable medical histories ever." — --Sunday Express "A gripping read, enlightening and moving by turns." — --Evening Standard "Like an experienced suspense writer, the author of this marvelous book reserves his good news until the end. . . . One of the additional pleasures of his book lies in its vivid parentheses... more », case histories, even footnotes. . . . [it is] enlivened by Dormandy's mordant wit and idiosyncratic style. . . . A fine book."
--Anita Brookner, The Sunday Times "A model of how medical history ought to be written . . . lucid in its analysis and perspicacious in its commentary."
--Peter Ackroyd, The Times of London "This is not a book for the faint-hearted or the hypochondriac. It is, however, a fascinating account of a disease which is probably as old as man himself."
--Literary Review "Dormandy writes extremely well, with a sharp wit . . . it is impossible to do justice to the riches to be found in this book."
--The Sunday Telegraph Thomas Dormandy's engrossing account of the complex social, artistic, and natural history of tuberculosis is also a chronicle of the medical profession at its best and worst. For the Victorians, who elevated illness and morbidity into art forms, the victims of tuberculosis were the ultimate in pale and interesting, not least because they were so often young and gifted. The roll call of genius reads like an anthem for doomed youth: Keats, Chopin, the Bronts, Robert Louis Stevenson, Chekhov, Orwell, to name but a few. The dying heroine became as much the stock in trade of Romantic fiction and painting as of opera. Laying waste to entire generations, tuberculosis lacked an effective treatment until after the Second World War, and a cure still eludes us.« less