ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that both the hope for successful treatment and the capacity to deliver it have to be judged within a historical context. The social history of tuberculosis, developing from T. McKeown's initial stance, has usually taken the form of case studies based on a single country. One of the main areas of historiographical interest has been the sanatorium the only therapeutic institution available to patients with tuberculosis around 1900. The first sanatorium pioneer, the German physician and 1848 revolutionary activist Dr Hermann Brehmer, opened his sanatorium in Gorbersdorf, Silesia, in 1854 in an abandoned hydrotherapeutic sanatorium. If the sanatoriums had a strong effect on tuberculosis mortality, it would have to be visible as a period effect from around the turn of the century, when the growth of sanatorium treatment became obvious. Sanatorium treatment seemed indeed to be over when Robert Koch announced successful attempts to treat tuberculosis with tuberculin in 1891.
