True Insight

As a victim of tuberculosis in 1935, I can testify to the accuracy of Richard Cabot’s statement in “The Genealogy of Mass General” (October/November 1984) that before the discovery of isoniazed, tuberculosis was “curable in the rich, incurable in the poor, while in the moderately well-to-do the chances are proportionately intermediate.” Of thirteen of my roommates at the sanitarium, ten were dead in five years—some from faulty diagnosis, others from lack of care after leaving the hospital. Many an arrested lunger had to take jobs totally unsuitable in order to support themselves and their families. Poverty was the greatest cause of recidivism.