ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that one could add that, while the new bacteriology did restructure the image of disease and of the patient, older models of disease were also adapted within the new model, continuing pre-Kochian notions of group predisposition to tuberculosis. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s 1895 development of X rays provided another set of visual signs for pulmonary tuberculosis. By 1916, the stages of tuberculosis were well described, from the initial early infiltration to the secondary infections. A popular history of tuberculosis, like all popular histories of medicine, would trace the history of this disease along an axis from ignorance to knowledge and finally cure. Hermann von Hayek, in the standard early twentieth-century overview of the theoretical problems associated with the illness, points out how self-contradictory and often confusing these concepts are when applied to the infectious diseases such as tuberculosis.
