Browsing through the huge Waterstones on Picadilly in London in October, I came across a book called Catching Breath, The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis by Kathryn Lougheed.
Apart from the endlessly fascinating disease itself, and its history, what struck me most about the book was how well it was written. I couldn‘t put it down and sat slumped against a bookshelf for over an hour. TB, something I thought belonged to the time of Shelley, I learnt, was alive and well. On Kathryn Lougheed‘s „whistle-stop tour“ through TB‘s history, we encounter curious and diverse realities like the correlation of TB with the gold mining industry or that you can catch TB from your pet.
The disease‘s success is largely due to the inequality of living and working conditions for millions of people in the world, which is one of the main points the author brings home in her book, the cost of living in „an unequal world“. In combination with witty and au point titles like „Didn‘t we already cure it“ and „TB continued“, Kathryn Lougheed puts TB on the forefront of our minds.
This is an excerpt from chapter 2, From Moo to Man and Back Again:
„No matter how exactly it got there, M. Tuberculosis has made itself a home across the globe. It‘s come a long way from its lowly roots in the environment, gradually evolving and diverging… first into a Canetti-like species that made the leap from a peace-loving existence to a pathogen… then into a strain capable of transmitting between its first hosts, whoever or whatever they were… on to a TB-causing species that may well have afflicted early hominids… and then to the last common ancestor of the M. Tuberculosis. From there, the family spread around the entire world and gradually adapted to life alonside a huge range of species, strains rising and falling with both hominid population and with the mammals who‘ve suffered from the disease during its long history. Some strains have been lost to time, such as those infecting early bovids – all we have to go on today are the scars they left behind. Others have flourished as the world around them changed in their favour. Along the way, M. Tuberculosis has hitched a ride with numerous species, finding its way to nearly every human population in every corner of the world. From ancient humans, to fearsome bison and ice-age mastodons, to the emergence of Homo Sapiens in the Cradle of Life, the modern-day cattle herds and Packy the Oregon Zoo poster elephant. As humans progressed onwards and upwards from the Neolithic Revolution, the bacterium‘s patience finally paid off. We handed TB everything it needed to become a global killer – urbanisation and, with it, a steady supply of new hosts.”
Source: Kathryn Lougheed, Catching Breath, The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis, Bloomsbury Sigma, 2017