Today, March 24, 2026 is World Tuberculosis Day.
Maybe you don’t know that tuberculosis and libraries are historically linked. Maybe you don’t know much about tuberculosis at all.
But odds are – especially if you like books or other media set in the 19th century, you’ve heard of ‘The Wasting Disease’ or ‘Consumption’. The disease was named this because of the way the infection seemed to consume or waste away the body.
In Europe, rates of consumption began to rise in the early 1600s to a peak level in the 1800s when it caused nearly 25% of all deaths. By 1918, 1 in 6 deaths could be attributed to the wasting disease.
Folks with consumption were sent to specialized, often high-altitude sanitoria (or specialized medical institutions) to live in isolation, resting for long periods of time with abundant fresh air and sunlight.
Consumption has come to be more accurately named Tuberculosis (or TB) as it is caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium Tuberculosis. It primarily attacks the lungs, though it can affect other organs.
Here are some other things about TB that you may not know:
- The Taylor Swift Song lyric “take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die” (from the song The Lakes) refers to the Lake District where in the 19th century, British poets would go to recover – or at least try to – and what they were dying of was almost always tuberculosis.
- Pasadena, California was founded as a tuberculosis colony. It was known as the “land of new lungs” because people would go there to try to heal their lungs.
- The 3 people who were most directly responsible for assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand were all dying of tuberculosis. They knew they were dying and wanted to die for a cause rather than just from a disease, thereby setting off World War I (and giving name to the post-punk revival band Franz Ferdinand)
- And finally, tuberculosis is one of the world’s leading infectious disease killers.
Yes – I said is.
Because maybe you didn’t know that tuberculosis is still around. That’s okay. I didn’t either until recently.
In 2023, there were 9,633 causes of TB reported in the United States. In 2024 10.7 million people globally fell ill with TB and 1.23 million of those people died from it.
March 24 marks the day in 1882 when Dr. Robert Koch announced that he had discovered the bacterium that causes TB, which opened the way towards diagnosing and curing the disease.
Yes, tuberculosis is a curable and preventable disease. So why are so many people dying?
The big reasons are:
- Inadequate healthcare access
- Drug-resistant strains
- Late diagnosis
While curable, poverty, lack of resources for testing and treatment, and weak immune systems ensure high fatality rates, especially in developing nations.
So, what can we do about it?
Well, I can’t tell you what to do. But here are some options:
- You can check out the book Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green (yes, the YA author) if you want to know more about the history and current state of TB (or even if you just want some more interesting facts).
- If you want to dig deeper, you can check out the World Health Organization’s campaign to end TB.
- Or you can simply sit with any new knowledge you gained from this post.
In fact, let me leave you with one more thing. Remember up top when I said that Libraries and TB are historically linked? Let me explain:
Libraries and TB are historically linked through a late 19th century and early 20th century panic known as the “great book scare” where it was feared that contaminated library books were a major source for spreading the disease.
In response, libraries were expected to disinfect books. These disinfection methods contained formaldehyde baths and putting carbonic acid crystals in ovens and holding the books in the vapor.
The great book scare rose from a combination of new theories about infection and a distaste for the concept of public libraries themselves, specifically because they provided easy access to what some people thought were “obscene or subversive books”. And while fears of disease were different from the fears of certain materials, opponents of the public library system helped stoke the fires of the book scare.
After much tribulation, reason eventually took hold. Experiment after experiment by doctors and hygiene professors reported next to no chance of contracting a disease from a book.
But you can contract knowledge, feelings, and a sense of wonder.