The slow, airborne bacterial lung disease known for most of history as consumption — among the deadliest infections humanity has ever faced, romanticized in the 19th century as a mark of genius even as it killed the poor in their millions, made curable by antibiotics in the 1940s and 1950s, and still killing well over a million people a year because the world has not delivered the cure it already holds.
For most of the 1800s, the surest way to look like a doomed poet was to be dying of tuberculosis. The disease left its victims pale, thin, bright-eyed, and feverish, and polite society decided this was beautiful. Keats died of it at twenty-five. So did two of the Bronte sisters. Chopin coughed blood at the piano. Opera built its tragic heroines around the consumptive's slow fade. The truth underneath the romance was uglier: tuberculosis was a disease of crowded slums and empty stomachs, and it killed perhaps one in seven people who died in 19th-century Europe. We have known how to cure it since the 1940s. It still kills more than a million people every year.