Overview
In The White Plague, Rene and Jean Dubos argue that the great increase of tuberculosis was intimately connected with the rise of an industrial, urbanized society and-a much more controversial idea when this book first appeared forty years ago-that the progress of medical science had very little to do with the marked decline in tuberculosis in the twentieth century.The White Plague has long been regarded as a classic in the social and environmental history of disease. This reprint of the 1952 edition features new introductory writings by two distinguished practitioners of the sociology and history of medicine. David Mechanic's foreword describes the personal and intellectual experience that shaped Rene Dubos's view of tuberculosis. Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz's historical introduction reexamines The White Plague in light of recent work on the social history of tuberculosis. Her thought-provoking essay pays particular attention to the broader cultural and medical assumptions about sickness and sick people that inform a society's approach to the conquest of disease.
Full Product Details
Author: Jean Dubos ,
David Mechanic ,
Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Imprint: Rutgers University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 2.30cm
, Length: 21.60cm
Weight: 0.425kg
ISBN: 9780813512242
ISBN 10: 0813512247
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 01 March 1987
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of print, replaced by POD
We will order this item for you from a manufatured on demand supplier.
Reviews
A many-faceted history of tuberculosis which considers this disease from early times on as ignorance, and false gentility, and finally the romanticism of the 19th century shrouded the gravity of consumption. And from the individual tragedies of Keats and Shelley and the many literary lives in which tuberculosis was the pervading presence, this goes on to the history of the illness- the old beliefs and nostrums which give way to scientific fact with Koch's identification of the bacillus; the widening knowledge (although still conflicting theories) of diagnosis, susceptibility, resistance and environment; the many therapeutic practices involved in its treatment- nutrition, climate, surgery, rest, drugs; and finally the longer and broader view of tubercudlosis in terms of epidemics and mortality and populations, in terms of public health and prevention and control- to the point where today the death rate has been decreased- but the incidence has not been subdued..... A popular perspective, which reflects not only the course of the disease but the countries and societies in which it festered and the shadow it still casts over many lives in many lands. (Kirkus Reviews)
Author Information
RENE DUBOS (1901-1981) was a distinguished microbiologist and commentator on the ecology of disease. Dubos’s other books include a standard biography of Louis Pasteur and several influential books on the environmental aspects of public health. His book Mirage of Health has been reprinted by Rutgers University Press. His wife, Jean Dubos–who had suffered from tuberculosis herself–collaborated on The White Plague.
