the.com/tuberculosis
Tuberculosis killed enormous numbers of people, though history often romanticized its suffering into something poetic.
means A chronic bacterial infection, usually of the lungs, spread through the air and historically known for causing slow wasting, coughing, and fever.
from From Latin tuberculum, 'small swelling or lump,' a diminutive of tuber, 'bump, swelling' (the same root that gave us the vegetable). The name describes the small nodules, or tubercles, that the disease causes in infected tissue. The word 'tuberculosis' itself was coined in the 1800s, once doctors understood the various older diseases it caused — consumption, phthisis, the 'wasting sickness' — were all one illness. The more poetic names, like consumption (because it seemed to consume the body from within), came earlier and lingered in popular use long after the clinical term took hold.
- nickname
- consumption, because it visibly consumed the body
- victorian aesthetic
- pale skin and thinness became fashionable because of it
- still active
- kills over a million people yearly, mostly poor countries
- treatable irony
- curable since the 1940s, still the top infectious killer