The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis
Thomas Goetz
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 1592409172
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The riveting history of tuberculosis, the world’s most lethal disease, the two men whose lives it tragically intertwined, and the birth of medical science.
In 1875, tuberculosis was the deadliest disease in the world, accountable for a third of all deaths. A diagnosis of TB—often called consumption—was a death sentence. Then, in a triumph of medical science, a German doctor named Robert Koch deployed an unprecedented scientific rigor to discover the bacteria that caused TB. Koch soon embarked on a remedy—a remedy that would be his undoing.
When Koch announced his cure for consumption, Arthur Conan Doyle, then a small-town doctor in England and sometime writer, went to Berlin to cover the event. Touring the ward of reportedly cured patients, he was horrified. Koch’s “remedy” was either sloppy science or outright fraud.
But to a world desperate for relief, Koch’s remedy wasn’t so easily dismissed. As Europe’s consumptives descended upon Berlin, Koch urgently tried to prove his case. Conan Doyle, meanwhile, returned to England determined to abandon medicine in favor of writing. In particular, he turned to a character inspired by the very scientific methods that Koch had formulated: Sherlock Holmes.
Capturing the moment when mystery and magic began to yield to science, The Remedy chronicles the stunning story of how the germ theory of disease became a true fact, how two men of ambition were emboldened to reach for something more, and how scientific discoveries evolve into social truths.
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including 47 percent of Europeans; globally, it causes 30 percent of all fatalities. But nearly all research has gone to establish some sort of behavioral or environmental link (smoking, diet, exercise, stress, and so on down the list), with a smaller fraction of known genetic causes. Except in rare cases of acute infection, such as infectious endocarditis, microbes have been largely thought irrelevant. But in 2013, at least one such association revealed itself, in the form of
Nicholas Nickelby (Dickens), 91 Nixon, Richard, 172 Nobel prize, 232–233, 243 Occam’s razor principle, 32 On the Origin of the Species (Darwin), 5 On the Structure of Human Body (Vesalius), 6 Opiates, xvi Opium, 168 Osler, William, 68 Otoscope, 18–19 Owen, Richard, 150 Paget, Sidney, 216–217, 236 Pall Mall Gazette, 142 Paper clip, xvii Pasteur, Louis, xiv addressing French medicalestablishment, 53–55 anthrax research, 61–64
trade and, increasingly, a respectable one as well. But for those physicians tasked with caring for patients, their bags remained discouragingly bare. Practically speaking, not much really worked. For prevention, there was a smallpox vaccine (developed in 1796 by Edward Jenner but made compulsory in Britain only in the 1850s and ’60s), but little else. For treatment, there were salves and ointments and tonics, but almost nothing that we would today consider a real, functional medication. For
like the chronic diseases of today, such as heart disease or diabetes, which can take years to whittle away at the body before dealing a fatal blow. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, tuberculosis was at its most rapacious. One can get a sense of how ubiquitous it was by noting how many famous figures of the day died from it. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Henry David Thoreau, all three Brontë sisters, Anton Chekhov, Washington Irving,
Study in Scarlet had made scarcely a ripple in the public’s mind? For one thing, The Strand editors recognized the power of images, and they had lavishly illustrated the stories with drawings by Sidney Paget. Paget wasn’t the first choice; the commission was intended for his brother Walter, who had previously illustrated Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. But the end result was inspired. Paget adroitly captured Conan Doyle’s description of Holmes’s profile: the beaked
