ReThink History: The White Plague Returns

ReThink History: The White Plague Returns

By ReThink HistoryScienceLife Sciences
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ReThink History: The White Plague Returns episodes

  • Ep 2: The White Plague
    For centuries consumption was a beautiful, fashionable death. Then, on 24 March 1882, Robert Koch showed it was an infection.
    This episode follows tuberculosis from a nine-thousand-year-old burial and the phthisis of the Greeks, through the Romantic age that made it a disease of poets, to the crowded industrial cities where it killed the young and the poor. Koch's lecture, now marked every year as World Tuberculosis Day, turned an inheritance into a contagion. New York answered with the first watching: reporting rules and a spitting law. And the stigma moved onto the poor and onto immigrants.
    Then the great argument: Thomas McKeown's case that TB deaths were falling long before any medicine could touch the disease, because people ate and lived better, and the historians who answered him.
    In this episode:
    • Keats, "consumptive chic" and the romance of a wasting disease
    • Koch's 1882 lecture and the "one in seven" figure
    • New York's reporting rules and its 1896 spitting law
    • McKeown versus his critics: what really brought TB down?
    New here? Start with Episode 1, The Disease We Thought We'd Beaten, at the top of the playlist.
    Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/p9hM9ijhqWo
    22 min
  • Ep 1: The Disease We Thought We'd Beaten
    How did a disease American medicine had filed under history climb back to more than ten thousand cases a year?
    Tuberculosis was supposed to be finished. Instead, U.S. cases rose four years in a row to the highest count since 2011. A Kansas City, Kansas outbreak became one of the largest in recent American history, though its exact size is disputed. Alaska carries about four times the national rate. And a retired anesthesiologist recalls patients arriving in Anchorage operating rooms, between 2010 and 2016, with active TB that nobody had disclosed.
    This opening episode maps the series and states the thesis it will test for twelve episodes: tuberculosis returns whenever a society stops watching. Then it makes the strongest case that "the return" is overstated, because rates remain near historic lows, some of the rise is a post-pandemic catch-up, and most U.S. cases are old infections waking up rather than new spread.
    In this episode:
    • The 2024 count and what it does and does not mean
    • Kansas City, Kansas, and the dispute over the outbreak's size
    • Why Alaska's rate is four times the national rate
    • The thesis, and the best case against it
    You're at the start: this is Episode 1 of 12, and the series runs in order.
    Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/yRAgmGdpSLY
    16 min

About ReThink History: The White Plague Returns

From the publisher's feed

For two generations Americans treated tuberculosis as a disease of the past. Then it came back. In 2024 the United States counted more than ten thousand cases, the most since 2011, and 2025 was barely lower. A Kansas outbreak became one of the largest documented in the country in decades. In Alaska, the rate is four times the national rate, and three in four cases are among Alaska Native people.