How Did Carlosis Affect The Victorian Era

The impact of tuberculosis on Victorian Era society was monumental. During this time, a myriad of new factories and job opportunities, in addition to quicker transportation, in cities helped instigate a massive movement of the global human population from farms and rural villages to large urban cities such as London, England, which created an explosive population growth and an enormous overcrowding issue, especially in Europe and the United States. Many of these newcomers could not afford a high rent, so they lived as tenants in congested rookeries and slums with poor ventilation and sanitation, the perfect breeding ground for tuberculosis. Overcrowded cities posed another problem too. More people leads to more crime which leads to prisons
For example, Victorians began associating tuberculosis with creativity. French writer Alexandre Dumas once said, “It was the fashion to suffer from the lungs; everybody was consumptive, poets especially.” As Dumas conveys, many poets, writers, virtuosos, and artists during the Victorian Era, like the Bronte sisters, met their deaths at the hands of tuberculosis. Some of these consumptives included John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederic Chopin, and Robert Louis Stevenson (Famous). The astoundingly long list of artists who were diagnosed with tuberculosis often led their fellow Victorians to believe that tuberculosis gave people superior artistic ability contracting it provided a deeper understanding of life of human suffering. Another seemingly advantageous aftermath of contracting tuberculosis was that it made women look more fashionable. The foundation of this absurdness can be unearthed in the term for tuberculosis at the time, consumption. Tuberculosis was commonly called consumption during the Victorian Era because it slowly wasted the body away from the inside out, causing victims to become pale and emaciated. This perfectly mirrored the romantic and beautiful Victorian fashion standards. Accordingly, upper class women often sought thinner bodies and paler, glowing skin by purposely starving themselves, to gain the so-called
However, the BCG Vaccine, which we still use today, was developed in 1921 by Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin. This vaccine is quite unreliable and inconsistent, but to a desperate world, it was deemed a huge success (Murphy 89). Then in 1943, the real miracle happened. Discovered by Selman Waksman, Albert Schatz, and Elizabeth Bugie, streptomycin was the first antibiotic that killed Mtb, but did not harm humans (Murphy 99). Soon though, Mtb evolved, yet again, to become resistant to streptomycin. After several more drugs were developed Mtb would always adapt and evolve into more and more drug resistant forms. Nowadays, tuberculosis is still a critical problem around the world, especially with its new partner in crime, HIV. Tuberculosis is the most efficient disease at taking advantage of AIDS patients’ weak immune systems, to such an extent, that together, they make the top ten leading causes of death worldwide, and tuberculosis itself is the world’s number one killer among infectious diseases (Weber). This is a major current public health issue that Americans tend to be ignorant