Tuberculosis - History, Causes, Treatment (2024)

Evidence that M. tuberculosis and humans have long coexisted comes primarily from studies of bone samples collected from a Neolithic human settlement in the eastern Mediterranean. Genetic evidence gathered from these studies indicates that roughly 9,000 years ago there existed a strain of M. tuberculosis similar to strains present in the 21st century. Evidence of mycobacterial infection has also been found in the mummified remains of ancient Egyptians, and references to phthisis, or “wasting,” occur in the writings of the Greek physician Hippocrates. In the medical writings of Europe through the Middle Ages and well into the industrial age, tuberculosis was referred to as phthisis, the “white plague,” or consumption—all in reference to the progressive wasting of the victim’s health and vitality as the disease took its inexorable course. The cause was assumed to be mainly constitutional, either the result of an inherited disposition or of unhealthy or dissolute living. In the first edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (1768), it was reported that a tendency to develop “consumption of the lungs” could tragically be expected in people who were fine, delicate, and precocious:

This is known from a view of the tender and fine vessels, and of the slender make of the whole body, a long neck, a flat and narrow thorax, depressed scapulæ; the blood of a bright red, thin, sharp, and hot; the skin transparent, very white and fair, with a blooming red in the cheeks; the wit quick, subtle, and early ripe with regard to the age, and a merry chearful disposition.

Based on the stage of the disease, treatments included regular bloodletting, administration of expectorants and purgatives, healthful diet, exercise such as vigorous horseback riding, and, in the grim final stages, opiates. The view that tuberculosis might be a contagious disease also had its adherents, but it was not until 1865 that Jean Antoine Villemin, an army doctor in Paris, showed that it could be transmitted from tuberculous animals to healthy animals by inoculation. The actual infectious agent, the tubercle bacillus, was discovered and identified in 1882 by the German physician Robert Koch. By that time the cultural status of the disease was assured. As summarized by Dr. J.O. Affleck of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in the ninth edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (1885), “Few diseases possess such sad interest for humanity as consumption, both on account of its widespread prevalence and its destructive effects, particularly among the young.” Causing as much as one-quarter of all deaths in Europe, arising with particular frequency among young adults between the ages of 18 and 35, and bringing on a lingering, melancholy decline characterized by loss of body weight, skin pallor, and sunken yet luminous eyes, tuberculosis was enshrined in literature as the “captain of death,” the slow killer of youth, promise, and genius. Prominent artists who died of consumption in the 19th century included the English poet John Keats, the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, and all of the Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne); in the early 20th century they were followed by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, and the German writer Franz Kafka. Without a clear understanding of the bacterium that caused the disease, little could be done for its victims except to isolate them in sanitariums, where cleanliness and fresh air were thought to help the body’s natural defenses to stop or at least slow the progress of the disease.

Preventive inoculation against tuberculosis, in which live but attenuated tubercle bacilli are used as a vaccine, was introduced in France in 1921 by bacteriologists Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin. The strain designated BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin), of bovine origin, became attenuated while growing on culture media containing bile. After its introduction by Calmette, large numbers of children were vaccinated in France, elsewhere in Europe, and in South America; after 1930 the vaccine was used on an extensive scale. In 1943–44 the Ukrainian-born microbiologist Selman A. Waksman and his associates, working at Rutgers University, New Jersey, U.S., discovered the potent antimicrobial agent streptomycin in the growth medium of the soil microorganism Streptomyces griseus. In 1944–45 veterinarian W.H. Feldman and physician H.C. Hinshaw, working at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, demonstrated its specific effect in inhibiting tuberculosis in both animals and people. Wide clinical use of streptomycin promptly followed, eventually in combination with other drugs to attack resistant bacilli.

In 1952 a great advance was made with the successful testing of isoniazid in the United States and Germany. Isoniazid is the most important drug in the history of chemotherapy for tuberculosis; other drugs were brought out in following years, pyrazinamide in 1954, ethambutol in 1962, and rifampicin in 1963. By this time the industrialized countries were already seeing the health benefits of economic improvement, better sanitation, more widespread education, and particularly the establishment of public health practice, including specific measures for tuberculosis control. The rate of deaths from tuberculosis in England and Wales dropped from 190 per 100,000 population in 1900 to 7 per 100,000 in the early 1960s. In the United States during the same time period, it dropped from 194 per 100,000 to approximately 6 per 100,000. In the popular mind, tuberculosis was then a disease of the past, of the indigent, and of the Third World.

However, in the mid-1980s the number of deaths caused by tuberculosis began to rise again in developed countries. The disease’s resurgence was attributed in part to complacent health care systems, increased immigration of people from regions where tuberculosis was prevalent, and the spread of HIV. In addition, throughout the 1990s the number of cases of tuberculosis increased in Africa. Global programs such as the Stop TB Partnership, which was established in 2000, have worked to increase awareness of tuberculosis and to make new and existing treatments available to people living in developing countries most affected by the disease. In the early 2000s, as a result of the rapid implementation of global efforts to combat the disease, the epidemic in Africa slowed and incidence rates stabilized. Despite a leveling off of per capita incidence of tuberculosis, the global number of new cases continued to rise, due to population growth, especially in regions of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean. The mortality rate from tuberculosis remains between 1.6 million and 2 million deaths per year.