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In the age of deconstruction, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and
the Social Experience of Illness in American History by Sheila M. Rothman (John
Hopkins University Press, £13, ISBN 0 8018 5186 6) places a different
perspective on medicine by studying tuberculosis from the patient’s, not the
doctor’s point of view. The evocative, subjective language illuminates the
social history of illness and how it shaped and was shaped by the cultural
environment. Particularly instructive for a modern world facing the AIDS
epidemic and even the re-emergence of TB itself, the leading cause of death
throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.