Why was tuberculosis called the ‘Great White Plague’?
This question should really be the other way round: a disease called the ‘Great White Plague’ was known and feared several decades before ‘tuberculosis’ became widely used in the mid-19th century. Named after the small lumps or tubercles it created in the lungs, tuberculosis had been afflicting human beings for many thousands of years, but its confusing array of symptoms precluded the identification of a single cause. It was not until Robert Koch isolated a specific bacillus in 1882 that tuberculosis was pinned down as an infectious rather than a hereditary disease.
Several labels remained in circulation to describe one of nature’s major killers. The oldest was the Greek word ‘phthisis’, while the most common was ‘consumption’, an evocative description for patients who wasted away as if being devoured. In addition, tubercular neck swellings were attributed to scrofula, known as the ‘king’s evil’ as it could supposedly be cured by the royal touch.
The term ‘white plague’ came into use relatively late. It was connected to Romanticism, with John Keats its iconic sufferer. As he wrote in Ode to a Nightingale: “Youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies.” Keats, who died of the disease in 1821, was describing the major features of the illness that was then responsible for a quarter of English deaths every year.
Tuberculosis was particularly prevalent among the young, so it was doubly white: the absence of colour reflected its victims’ extreme pallor as well as the purity attributed to youth. And, among some people, there was perhaps also a fear that it would sweep across Europe, eliminating the so-called ‘white race’.