ABSTRACT
Many writers have claimed that the medical understanding of tuberculosis was transformed following Koch's identification of the tubercle bacillus as the essential cause of the disease in 1882. 1 Their argument is that tuberculosis, especially its pulmonary form then known as phthisis or consumption, ceased to be regarded as an inherited, constitutional disease and instead became a specific, acquired infection; put another way, its origin moved from generation-to-generation to person-to-person transmission. In this paper I challenge this received account by discussing changing treatments and ideas about the disease over the period 1860–1890 in Britain, focusing on the two groups most interested in the disease at this time—clinicians (mostly those in specialist consumption hospitals) and those who speculated on the pathology of the disease. 2
