Coming to PBS’s American Experience tonight, Tuesday, February 10: THE FORGOTTEN PLAGUE
Chana Gazit’s look back at the deadliest disease in recorded history makes its debut on the long-running PBS series tonight.
Once rampant, and responsible, at the start of the 19th Century, for the deaths of one/seventh of the world’s cumulative population, tuberculosis is among the many diseases that were reconceptualized and effectively treated within modern times, though it has shown an alarming recurrence in recent decades. Gazit’s film, hewing close to American Experience’s set format – exposition through a mix of excessive narration and supplemental expert talking heads – explores the realities of life – and death – with TB, or consumption, as it was more popularly known as, until its eventual cure. At its core is the story of Edward Livingston Trudeau, a physician who was diagnosed with the disease in 1873, and was urged to turn to the natural world for treatment, with popular wisdom linking fresh air with a potential cure. He founded a sanitarium at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, spawning imitators to cater to consumptives, and organized a laboratory to study the disease, eventually replicating the work of German microbiologist Robert Koch. Koch initially identified the cause of the disease as a bacterium, changing the way that consumption was viewed, leading to its rebranding as tuberculosis – based on the shape of the offending bacterium – and its being treated as a public health emergency, with some surprising impact on culture, from the introduction of Kleenex to the disappearance of beards and the shortening of women’s hemlines, all with the aim of stopping the easy transmission of germs. It’s information like this, and the earlier role of consumption in helping to populate Western cities, whose advertising campaigns initially wooed consumptives with claims of cures due to Los Angeles or Denver’s clean air, that provides the most interesting elements of Gazit’s otherwise competent but conventionally constructed film.
what (not) to doc 