91É«ÇéƬ

Fancy an egg-yolk enema? Or having your pleural cavity stuffed with ping-pong balls? These and other revolting “cures” abound in Katherine Ott’s Fevered Lives (Harvard University Press, £18.50/$27.95, ISBN 0 674 29910 8), a riveting account of the changing face of tuberculosis in American culture since 1870. With an ease that belies the depth of her research, Ott reveals how the glamorous middle-class consumptives of the late Victorian era gradually gave way to the impoverished, coughing wretches of this century, disenfranchised in part by germ theory and the hysteria that followed it. Today, pneumonia is the bigger killer, yet people with TB still carry the cultural equivalent of the leper’s bell.