In Ye Olden Times: Christmas Fundraising Against Tuberculosis

Howdy neighbor! This week, I have mixed news, but in the interest of the holiday season I’m going to try to keep it positive. I had already planned to write a column like this sometime next year, at a better time, but recent circumstances now prompt my pen to action in the name of public interest. Let all our readers attend this warning; I have lately heard, coming on the best authority from the afflicted party, that a friend of mine in Androscoggin County now languishes in the grip of Tuberculosis (TB), that dread scourge so well-known to our grandsires as Consumption.

This is no idle matter. For all the furor still in recent memory over Covid-19, this news strikes a far greater fear in this historian’s soul than did any of the pandemic fearmongering, and if it doesn’t worry yours then this warning is for you. Do not fall victim to the prevailing belief that TB is some old-timey disease that no one ever gets anymore. A ‘touch of Consumption’ is quite deadly, and the numbers are sobering. An ancient scourge, by the dawn of the 19th century, it is estimated to have killed one in seven out of all the people who had ever lived, and in the course of the 19th century the ‘White Death’ killed a quarter of the adult population of Europe. Here in America, in the 1800s, Tuberculosis killed more people here in New England than any other disease. It is estimated that between 70 and 90 percent of our entire urban population were at one time infected with TB. And about 80% of all who developed active cases of it died.