ABSTRACT
In September of 1893 a Philadelphia doctor named Lawrence Flick (1893) received a doleful letter from the husband of a consumptive patient. Husband and physician had agreed to tell the woman she had “a malignant tumor,” a diagnosis they felt would be easier for her to bear than the knowledge she had an advanced case of tuberculosis—a grim reflection on the terrors associated with consumption. But the man had finally been forced to tell his wife the truth because other family members feared that she would unwittingly infect her little granddaughter by such loving intimacies as feeding the baby from her spoon. “Of course it became my duty to say so to Mrs. P and I have the usual credit of the bearer of bad news,” her husband complained to Flick. To make her aware of the danger she represented to the child, the man gave his wife a brief lesson in the germ theory of tuberculosis: “that the mycrobes [sic]or bacilli might carry the disease to a young child and that for the sake of all of us she must not kiss the child or give it a chance of inhaling her breath or feeding from her plate of food.”
