The Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History

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 of tuberculosis from  the slums of 19th-century New York to modern Mumbai. In a narrative  spanning century, Krishnan shows how superstition and folk-remedies,  made way for scientific understanding of TB, such that it was controlled  and cured in the West.
The cure was never available to black and  brown nations. And the tuberculosis bacillus showed a remarkable  ability to adapt – so that at the very moment it could have been  extinguished as a threat to humanity, it found a way back, aided by  authoritarian government, toxic kindness of philanthropists, science  denialism and medical apartheid.
Krishnan’s original reporting  paints a granular portrait of the post-antibiotic era as a new,  aggressive, drug resistant strain of TB takes over. Phantom Plague is an  urgent, riveting and fascinating narrative that deftly exposes the  weakest links in our battle against this ancient foe.