The longest and most dangerous of all chronic diseases
Speaker: Dr Helen Bynum

• Friday 21 June 2013, 7.30PM
• Free admission
  Booking required, see below for tickets
• York Medical Society (view map)

Event details

Which disease did French clinician Gaspard-Laurant Bayle refer to in his lectures to the Paris Medical Faculty in 1809/10 as “the longest and most dangerous of all chronic diseases"? Surprisingly for us, Bayle was describing pulmonary tuberculosis. In this talk, author Helen Bynum uses the experiences of three tuberculous patients Tobias Smollett (1721-71), John Keats (1795-1821) and George Orwell (1903-1950) to explore pulmonary tuberculosis as a chronic disease of the past and reflect on its modern face. Get ready for tales of travel and confinement to bed, bloodletting and bloody sputum, and not enough happy endings.

Centre for Global Health Histories

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