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The hump high in the back of this three-thousand year old Egyptian mummy indicates a spine crumpled by tuberculosis.
the lungs became cheesy and tattered. The diseased tissues were impenterable; those caring for sufferers coudl not see in but could see only what came out. The ancient Greeks developed tests to analyze what the tubercular patient coughed up. In one test, the physician would have the patient spit into a copper vessel filled with seawater; if the sputum sank, death was near. In another, he dripped the sputum on hot coals; if it smelle of rotten meat, again, death was near. But the condition of the lungs themselves was hidden deep inside the chest of the living.
As Keats lay feverish in his bed, there were thousands of other young European men and women who were also in peril, tuberculosis replicating relentlessly deep in their bodies, and yet undisclosed. Among them was a young French doctor, Rene Laennec. In his short, illness-ridden life, he would bring to the world a window into the chest by inventing the stethocope.
Like Keats, Laennec lost his mother when he was young, just five years old, to what historians believe was tuberculosis; and also like Keats, Laennec was to see his brother die of the same disease. After their mother's death, the Laennec boys had been raised by their uncle, who was a doctor. It was because of his guardian's influence that when he was still a small, frail, freckled boy, Laennec determined to make medicine his career.
This was a time when medicine was becoming more scientific; that is, doctors were exploring by careful observation and experiment the ways that the body worked and how to treat disease. Doctors in Europe were beginning to look upon disease differently. The physicians of ancient Greece considered disease as part of the natural world rather than the spiritual. They based their study upon direct observation: what was part of the physical world one could learn about by observing with one's own eyes. But in the Middle Ages in Europe, the followers of the Greek tradition began to put more faith in what was written in the old books than in what they could see. For instance, although, unlike most Greek anatomists, medieval physicians dissected dead bodies, and therefore had the opportunity to correct some big mistakes in the Greek books on anatomy, instead they had the Greek books on anatomy read out loud when they dissected, and tried to describe what they saw the same way the Greeks believed it to be. They could have seen with their own two eyes that the Greeks were wrong about things - that there were no holes in the heart