Were there any real pre-antibiotic cures for TB?
Penicillin doesn’t work against TB. I doubted you on this one SCDB; I had always just assumed, along with some other people whose articles I found online, that TB had developed resistance to penicillin, but detailed accounts (such as this charming, prize-winning essay by a high-school student) all support your assertion. But I did also find a very interesting account which also bears directly on the OP’s question: Apart from the discovery of Lactobacillus bulgaricus, Dr. Grigorov made a major contribution to the creation of an anti-tuberculosis vaccine. On 20 December 1906, in Paris in issue No104 of the “La Presse Médicale” medical journal, was published his scientific report “The Anti-tuberculosis vaccine”, which informed the scientific community about the results of his research into the application of penici
Reading about Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, who founded a TB sanitorium in Saranac Lake, NY, gives a lot of information about the treatment of TB at the turn of the century. He was diagnosed with TB in 1870, but after moving to the cold, clear climate of the Adirondacks, he went into remission. He later moved his practise to the mountains and was the first U.S. doctor to isolate the bacteria that caused TB. Saranac Lake is full of turn of the century homes with “cure porches”, screened in areas open to the air. So, if you caught TB now, you could move up there and hope for remission.
Deeply inhaling someone’s blankets would give you TB, if anything – it’s airborne transmitted. The only known ‘vaccine’ is something known as bacille Calmette-Guerin, which isn’t a very good vaccine. Vaccination with bCG turns your PPD test positive, rendering it impossible to screen you for the presence of tuberculosis; that combined with the vaccine’s very low efficacy mean it’s not routinely used in much of the world. It’s not like the polio or chicken pox vaccines, folks; you can still die of TB even if you were vaccinated with bCG, and thousands do so each year. Many public health experts point out that the loss of the ability to screen for TB accurately probably far outweighs the public health benefits conferred by this vaccine. I believe the modern era of anti-TB therapy began with streptomycin, a medicine whose systemic toxicities (deafness and kidney damage) have caused it to fall out of modern favor. It can be purified f
