Reviews for The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France

The average rating for The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-07-26 00:00:00 Douglas Brtalik In this book (more a textbook than a non-fiction read), Barnes chronicles the history of cultural, medicinal and political responses to tuberculosis during and around the Belle-Epoch period in France (the last decade of the 19th century). He walks the reader thru the early "consumptive" or romantic perception of TB (which affected women of the Sarah Bernhardt type) to the later view that the poor, immoral and alcoholic (mostly men) were the ones affected and that the more marginalized people were the cause of it's transmission. This time frame covers both before and after germ theory and Koch's discovery of the tubercle bacteria. Barnes's book echoes Susan Sontag's essays on how and why societies assign moral meanings to disease. TB remains a significant disease in third world countries and is making a resurgence in the US today. Poverty remains the overriding and underlying cause of this resurgence, i.e. homelessness, malnutrition, drug abuse and alcoholism are factors which suppress the immune system and are more prevalent among the poor. (Interestingly, only about 10% of people who have been exposed to the tubercle bacillus exhibit symptoms.) Barnes argues that the best approach to fighting TB and other diseases is to fight poverty and increase access to health care. Medicine alone (and several strains of TB are today resistant to antibiotics) cannot eradicate TB. I recommend this book if you are a fan of French history and/or the history of medicine.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-15 00:00:00 Walter Wiese An excellent, highly readable account of French cultural life during the occupation and Vichy, full of interesting and vivid anecdotes. It is hard to tell how much of this is original research, but an excellent read, nonetheless, for those interested in this period.