Tuberculosis
(Script No. 4)

During the last century tuberculosis still caused about 1.2 million deaths per year in Austria.

In former times tuberculosis was a dreaded plague. Today this disease has mostly lost its horrors, but it can become epidemic again at any time.

In the middle ages tuberculosis was thrown into the shade as an endemic plague by cholera and the black death. Already in the early middle ages French and later English kings believed that tuberculosis can be healed by imposition of hands.

At the exhibition please have a look at the scrofula man.

Various levels of society were afflicted by this disease. Even theatre and opera were dealing with this subject area.

Infection: Tuberculosis is a transmissible disease. Possible ways of transmissions are:

• 1. The anatomical tubercle is created by direct contact with bacteriogenic material. Dissecting assistants, doctors, ranchers, and butchers are especially endangered. Therefore, infection with the postmortem wart is viewed as a professional disease.
• 2. Infection via intestines: Intestinal tuberculosis was transmitted by the milk of sick cows or by the meat of sick animals. This type of infections could be largely exterminated by national meat inspections and by the pasteurization of the milk. There are wet preparations of a guinea-pig, a pigeon, a chicken, and a snake with tuberculosis exhibited. In addition you can see a wet preparation of human intestines with tuberculous ulcer.
• 3. The most common way of infection is by inhalation, but also transmissions via eye, in utero, or intrapartum are possible. You can see some examples at the exhibition. In 1882 Robert Koch presented the pathogen of tuberculosis, the tubercle bacillus, to the Medical Society in Berlin.

Pulmonary Tuberculosis

The collection comprises exhibits of: Primary complex of tuberculosis, laryngeal tuberculous ulcer, miliary tuberculosis, tuberculous caverna, tuberculous phthisis, and pleural tuberculosis. In the course of the disease tuberculosis is transferred to all organs of the body. Thus, dermal tuberculosis often is a secondary tuberculosis. There are several moulages exhibited showing tuberculosis of the skin.

There is another show case exhibiting preparations of bone tuberculosis.

The only prophylaxis of tuberculosis carried out was to install spittoons, which are exhibited at the museum as well. In the middle ages tuberculosis was mainly treated by bloodletting. Also inhalators had long been known. Even shortly after the 2nd world war tuberculosis was only treated by cures, inhalations, and the socalled pneumothorax. Also therapies with the light of Finsen's lamp were commonly applied.

Finally the treatment of tuberculosis became successful when streptomycin was developed by Waxman in 1943.