Customer Reviews

The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won - And Lost

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Tuberculosis killed one billion (yes, billion with a "b") in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alone. Ryan's masterful work describes the decades-long war against the terrifying disease - a conflict that continues even today. In a manner suitable for the layman and written at the pace of an action novel, he describes the staggering amount of work required to gain even the slightest advantage against the dreadful disease.

From his descriptions of tuberculosis itself ("...once established in the lungs, or the bowel, in the throat, in the kidneys, in the eye, or in the very marrow of the bones, [it] festered on and on, impervious to all efforts to cure it, seemingly indestructible. No antibiotic would ever kill such a germ, protected by its thick impenetrable waxy coat.") to his characterizations of the work of scientists such as Waksman, Schact, Lehmann, and Domagk - Ryan has created a work like no other.

Even these brilliant scientists, attacking the disease in every conceivable way, have only temprarily halted its advance against mankind. Its ability to mutate, resisting all known treatments -in combination with new diseases such as AIDS - have raised the terrifying spectre of a renewed disease capable of killing billions more. Nerve-wracking and enlightening, Ryan's work serves as a clarion call to renewed action against TB.

As a lung doctor coming from a country where tuberculosis is a common disease I thought this book was going to be interesting. I was wrong. It was fascinating! I made the mistake of start reading it while I was working on some professional projects. The result was several nights of poor sleep just because I started my reading after finishing my work late at night and I just could not stop reading it! I am going to buy several copies for some of my coleagues. This is a great book

Certainly the great hallmark of modern civilization is the dramatically increased ease of communication, and it is this ease of communication which has so changed the face of modern science. It is fitting, then, that Dr. Ryan begins his book with a brief history of tuberculosis leading up to Koch's epic-making lecture on 24 August 1882 announcing his discovery of the cause of tuberculosis. Towards the end of the chapter he quotes the protest of an editor at the New York Times about the delay in receiving the news in America; the editor wrote, "it is safe to say that the little pamphlet which was left to find its way through the slow mails . . . outweighed in importance and interest for the human race all the press dispatches which have been flashed under the Channel since the date of the delivery of the address - March 24."

As the book proceeds, we see the effect of the growth of the worldwide scientific establishment and the network of scientists and ideas that have led the battle against the "white plague." As fascinating and compelling as is the subject of the search for the cure for tuberculosis, I think an even more important theme of the book is just exactly how science works. We see Paul Erlich influenced by Koch's lecture and the coincidental development of the sanatorium movement. We see Selman Waksman working in soil microbiology and taking as an assistant the young René Dubos who, reading an article by Winogradsky, would drastically change his career to focus on what he described as "the biochemical unity of life" and what would come to be known as the ecology of disease and health. We see Oswald Avery (see "The Great Influenza" by John M. Barry) assisted partially by Dubos in discovering "that DNA was the wonder chemical of heredity and life." And we're still only about a quarter of the way through the book.

It's true that the book reads somewhat like a thriller, with one discovery leading to the next, and with the inevitable dead ends and red herrings, but through it all we are impressed with the steady, relentless stream of study, investigation, and discovery. It is certainly one of the best illustrations I have ever read of how science works. It should be required reading for, well, everyone.

Frank Ryan writes overly long about the attempts to fight tuberculosis. Admittedly, Ryan is no historian. His work bounces along from one aspect of the stuggle to another, while only the most tenuous relation is suggested. He bogs down in the details of tangential aspects of the story and it is only in reflective hindsight that one begins to find continuity.

Ryan's book traces the many threads of research that produced ever-increasing breakthroughs in controlling tuberculosis; the researchers involved operated more or less independently, unaware of each other's existence and progress, thus affording little opportunity for cooperation.

Ryan's complicated story of the many contributions to tuberculosis research perhaps seems mildly disheartening. The search for treatments for tuberculosis spread across a far greater geography and period of time. The presentation of these various groups researching tuberculosis, brought together in a single tome with decades of work artificially telescoped into a few hundred pages, blurs the reality that researchers at the time did not see the opportunities for cooperation with the clarity of hindsight. In fairness, Ryan did try to present scientists laboring, incognizant of each other's work, isolated by oceans and political ideologies. However the petty struggles and backstabbing over patent rights, royalties and scientific prestige suggest baser motives than one would like to attribute to persons engaged in saving mankind from a deadly disease.

This book really gives the inside story about Tuberculosis or "Consumption" as it has been known for centuries. The first chapter was a little slow and preachy, but by the 3rd chapter the author really takes off with fascinating details and glimpses into the horrible suffering of TB victims. Bless the memory of all those nameless souls who died of this dreadful, perplexing, and still 'consuming' disease. Truly a sad story in the annals of medicine, and a deeper look at our mortal vulnerability to the invisible microbes that threaten our lives daily. We think we have found all the answers in our super technical, scientifically advanced generation, but this book proves that we are vastly outnumbered in our battle with lethal diseases such as TB, AIDS, SARS, and certain cancers. As long as their is life there will be suffering, and this book offers a closer look at that undesirable but certain reality.

This book should be required reading for our schools! It shows how people communicated ideas and progress on the cure for tuberculosis and made incredible discoveries! It reads like a novel and is superb!

The lack of interest among scientists for this book speaks volumes about who is in science these days. But before we go into that, I advise anyone to read this utterly spectacular book. It weaves the elements of character, mainly dedication, into the unfolding story of the fight against tb. I have never run across science writing as good as this. Its the weaving together of character and events that makes Ryan's work so extrraordinary.
And about scientists today. Im not going to discuss that, since I just ate. :)