Forgotten Plague, The (2015)

[bunniefuu]

♪

[wind blowing loudly]

SHERWOOD DAVIES: I can remember exactly where I was

when my mother told me my father had died.

We had snow.

I was sitting on a step, trying to put on my boots.

She came over and said,

"Sherwood, your father died last night."

She was very depressed.

And I felt concerned for my mother

because what she had gone through.

My mother's father had tuberculosis

and he died when she was one year old.

Her mother had tuberculosis and was in and out of hospitals.

My mother developed tuberculosis,

and, of course, my father succumbed to tuberculosis.

And then I had developed tuberculosis.

It's mind-boggling.

I mean, you think of...

You worry about both your mother and your father.

But then you say, "Well, what's gonna happen to me?"

NARRATOR: For centuries, people called it the Captain of Death.

By the dawn of the th century, the disease had k*lled

one in seven of all people that had ever lived,

more than any other illness.

The ancient Greeks called it "consumption."

NANCY TOMES: The name "consumption" came from the emaciation

as the fever built and as the coughing continued--

the sensation of essentially coughing yourself to death.

ANDREA BARRETT: The disease is what used to be called "the wasting disease."

You just get thinner and thinner.

And so if you look at pictures of people

who are dying of the disease,

their cheekbones are very prominent.

Their eyes seem very large and hollow.

All the flesh has wasted off their face and their throat.

NARRATOR: Victims were racked with hacking, bloody coughs,

debilitated by pain in their lungs,

and so consumed with fatigue

they could barely get out of bed.

The end could come quickly

or unfold slowly over years of suffering.

There was no known cure.

In the early s, consumption struck America with a vengeance,

ravaging communities,

touching the lives of almost every family.

SHEILA ROTHMAN: No one was spared-- rich, poor, young, old--

and no one knew who was going to be attacked

and how long they would live.

Women who had children

understood that their children might well become orphans,

and that they had to train them how to behave

in other people's households.

There's a desperation in the stories of,

"How can I be sure that when I'm gone,

my children will be taken care of?"

And a lot of talk about death.

And you had to train children for dealing with death

and dealing with the death of parents

and how to go on and manage.

NARRATOR: Faced with a deadly and painful disease,

tens of thousands of Americans would journey

to far-flung parts of the country--

some to the remote wilderness,

others to new cities in the south and west--

all in search of an elusive cure.

[birds chirping]

In , the Adirondack Mountains in New York

was one of the most remote regions in the country.

That June, a -year-old physician

arrived from New York City to spend his final days

in the woods and lakes that he had loved as a child.

Edward Trudeau had just received a crushing diagnosis.

MARY HOTALING: The doctor tells him that

the upper third of one of his lungs

is involved in an active tuberculous process.

He just stutters his way out the door

and stands on the stoop

and he says, "The world had gone dark."

He just... he couldn't believe it.

NARRATOR: Trudeau had no illusions about the disease.

Seven years earlier,

it had claimed the life of his older brother.

TOMES: Trudeau marked his brother's death

as one of the turning points in his life.

At the time, he'd been very close to his brother,

and that experience of caring for him

in his final days...

Imagine then his horror

when he finds out he himself develops tuberculosis.

HOTALING: He was sure he would die.

He expected to die,

and he couldn't believe that this had happened to him.

NARRATOR: Trudeau's doctor had told him

to spend what time he had left in nature.

Physicians of the day believed consumption,

as they called it, was hereditary.

But they had started to notice

that fresh air and outdoor living

could sometimes change the course of the illness.

Though he could barely walk,

Trudeau pursued his passion for hunting

by lying down in a canoe padded with balsam branches.

"My hunting blood responded at once," he recalled,

"and I forgot all the misery and sickness

I had gone through."

By the end of the summer, Trudeau had put on pounds.

But as soon as he returned to the city,

his health deteriorated.

Three years later, nearing death,

Trudeau decided to move his wife and two young children

to a small Adirondack outpost called Saranac Lake,

one of the coldest places in the country.

Even in the dead of winter, Trudeau's health improved.

He was becoming convinced the clean mountain air

was like medicine for the lungs.

"The open-air life," he declared,

"has a wonderful effect upon my health."

TOMES: Using climate to treat consumption

goes all the way back to Greek medicine.

In the th century, when they started to get more scientific,

they also started to try to break that down and think,

"Is it cold mountain air?

Is it warm, dry air that does better for the consumptive?"

Some would say, "Go to the mountains.

The air is good there."

Others would say, "Go to the beach.

Sit in the sun."

In fact, physicians advocated all of the above.

NARRATOR: No region would hold greater lure for consumptives

than the newly opened territories

of the American West.

ROTHMAN: The men who began to explore the West

came back with all sorts of stories:

that the West was Eden, that the West was health-giving,

that people who were thin went out there

and became healthy and strong.

And so you began to get this image of the West

as a place to go because you would get well.

"Come west and be cured.

Come west and get life."

It was a health-giving Eden,

this outdoors, beautiful, unsettled part of the country.

NARRATOR: Starting in the s,

health seekers fanned out across the vast plateau

between Mississippi and California,

living rugged, primitive lives in the wilderness.

Together with pioneers and explorers,

they played an integral role in settling the West.

TOMES: Every western state,

you look at the history of their larger cities

and you will find that health seekers,

many of whom were consumptives,

were among the earliest migrants--

young men with consumption,

who were moving to cities like Denver or Los Angeles

in search of the cure, chasing the cure.

NARRATOR: In the s, railroad lines began to stretch

into the farthest reaches of the country.

Jumping on the interest in the climate cure,

developers launched an unprecedented campaign

to entice people with consumption

to settle in stops along the newly laid tracks.

ROTHMAN: There were railroad advertisements all over,

where they would show a picture of somebody thin and tubercular,

and say, "Go West and have health."

And there were developers

that were building communities, settlements,

where they said the air was particularly wonderful,

and the climate was particularly great,

and come here, live in our community,

and you will be cured.

TOMES: There was no nothing that was too excessive to say.

You didn't worry about over-selling the goods.

Los Angeles is the healthiest place in the world?

Sure.

Who's gonna argue?

Well, maybe Denver.

But they're not around, so you could get away with it then.

NARRATOR: Tens of thousands of health seekers migrated west.

Dozens of new cities sprang up to accommodate the influx:

places like Albuquerque, Colorado Springs, and Tucson.

The city of Pasadena

started as a colony for consumptives from Indiana.

Some got better, but many were buried in newly dug cemeteries.

Promoters had given little thought

to what would happen to their communities

if climate was not a cure-all.

In the Adirondacks,

Edward Trudeau had started practicing again,

gaining fame as the doctor

who saw patients in his hunting clothes.

But he suffered one relapse after another,

each bringing with it the memory of his brother's death.

TOMES: There was the so-called galloping consumption

where it would go into the blood stream

and you would die very, very quickly.

But in other cases,

it was a long, slow, and agonizing death.

And no one quite knew why or what made a difference to that.

But for the most part, consumption was a disease

that could last for ten, , years.

NARRATOR: More and more, Trudeau was becoming preoccupied

with finding a cure for consumption,

combing medical journals

for the latest information on the illness.

He stumbled on a startling revelation

in an obscure article written by a German scientist.

TOMES: And he reads a copy of Robert Koch's paper,

and it is like a religious experience for him.

You know, "My eyes were opened.

I could hardly believe what I was reading."

It was transformative.

NARRATOR: Robert Koch was one of a handful of European scientists

promoting a radical new idea that germs cause disease.

Most doctors believed sickness

was caused by disturbances in bodily fluids,

or from toxic gases or filth, or was inherited.

In a complete departure,

Koch announced that he had found a bacterium,

the tubercle bacillus, that he claimed caused tuberculosis.

He explained that when he injected the bacteria

into a healthy animal,

it rapidly developed the disease.

ANDREA COOPER: And what Koch did,

and this is the basis of modern science,

is that he took bacteria,

he grew it to purity,

and then he delivered it and caused disease,

and this was the key point.

You could isolate the bacterium from the infected person,

you could grow it in isolation,

and then it would cause disease when it was transmitted again.

NARRATOR: Koch also described how the bacteria spread.

The germs, he said, were expelled through coughing.

Someone close by could inhale the airborne bacteria

into their lungs,

where it lodged and caused disease.

There was no doubt, he declared,

that the disease was highly contagious.

His findings were so outside mainstream thinking,

the medical profession simply ignored them.

The idea of tuberculosis being communicable

was so hard to fit with medical tradition.

And a lot of the resistance really came out of people

who had been looking and thinking for a long time.

It just didn't make sense to them.

NARRATOR: Trudeau, on the other hand, believed he was witnessing

the dawn of a new era in medicine

and set out to learn how to grow the bacteria himself.

HOTALING: He was an intuitive scientist.

He was not a trained scientist at all.

When he went to medical school, they didn't have a lab.

He never learned how to use a microscope.

So, you know, this was a new territory for him.

NARRATOR: Trudeau set up a rudimentary laboratory

in his house in Saranac Lake.

Months went by as he struggled to replicate Koch's experiments.

COOPER: He has no running water in his house,

he has no electricity, of course,

and he had to create his own thermometer, his own incubator,

and he would have doors that he would open and close

depending on what the temperature was

on his homemade thermometer.

And he was trying to maintain

a -degree centigrade environment

for the bacteria to grow.

So he did that,

and he had little candles underneath his incubator

warming it up, and opening the doors and closing the doors,

and he was doing this constantly for three weeks

to grow the bacteria.

He's all alone.

He has no faculty, he has no help.

You know, he's doing it by himself

just out of his own intellectual curiosity.

NARRATOR: After countless attempts,

in , Trudeau became the first American

to verify Koch's discovery.

TOMES: He takes a sample from his own throat,

develops a culture of it,

and he can see he himself is carrying

this rod-shaped bacillus that Koch has described.

So imagine, he was able to test the hypothesis

and to show that indeed, there it was.

NARRATOR: Far away from the power centers of medicine,

Trudeau's work went largely unrecognized.

For the next decade,

Americans continued to go about their lives,

unaware of the contagion in their midst.

NARRATOR: In , a young writer with consumption

arrived at the Los Angeles Railroad Station,

where many newcomers were greeted by a -piece band.

Charles Willard was hoping to get well enough

to restart his career.

Los Angeles was hardly more than a sleepy pueblo town,

its streets still unpaved.

Yet civic leaders had grand visions for the city

and eagerly hawked the dry, temperate climate

to East Coast invalids.

After working a few odd jobs,

Willard landed a position at the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce,

where he was put in charge

of luring health seekers to California.

So here's the irony: he himself is still very sick,

but there he is, promoting the idea of the climate cure

when he has not been cured by it.

NARRATOR: Willard started a journal called <span tts:fontStyle="italic"> The Land of Sunshine</span>

and filled it with testimonials

to the healing powers of Southern California.

He targeted the publication to East Coast readers,

especially those with money.

TOMES: Charles Willard did not want to attract

the wrong kind of sick people to Los Angeles--

people who were not educated,

people who were not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

So there was a real double message there.

"Yes, come if you're like me, but don't come if you're not."

NARRATOR: The fine points of Willard's message

would quickly get lost in the stampede.

Thousands of people with consumption

swarmed into the city.

A metropolis priding itself on health

soon contained a huge population of sick and dying people.

One resident described the sounds of the city

as "a constant chorus of coughs."

TOMES: Try to imagine L.A. as a city of invalids.

It really is hard to imagine.

But indeed, that was the effect of this kind of boosterism.

And when too many of them came,

it got to be another kind of problem.

Charles Willard succeeded too well.

NARRATOR: Los Angeles was not unique.

Across the West, other cities were also paying a price

for their recruiting success.

ROTHMAN: And suddenly these cities that saw themselves catering

to middle-class and upper-class people

had a large number of poor, sick people

all over in their midst,

and they were unable to care for them.

And they didn't have the resources

to care for them, either.

NARRATOR: In Saranac Lake, Edward Trudeau had watched with alarm

as the science of contagion continued to go unheeded.

Along with other scientists, he started publishing papers

and attending medical conferences

to explain the body of evidence.

Finally, by the mid-s,

the medical community was persuaded.

The term "consumption" was dropped in favor of the name

that linked it to the bacteria: tuberculosis, or TB.

Within a decade,

Robert Koch would go on to win the Nobel Prize.

For patients, the new understanding of the disease

would only add to the suffering.

TOMES: The sad aspect of this scientific progress

is that it made the person with tuberculosis

into more of a threat.

When you thought consumption ran in families,

you couldn't do anything about it.

If you got it, you were not to be blamed.

Now the individual with tuberculosis was the danger.

The more focus there was on person-to-person transmission,

the more that stigma, that prejudice, intensified.

BARRETT: The idea that although outwardly

you may look like a healthy, beautiful, -year-old woman,

you are in fact vile in some way, contaminated.

You know that something awful is happening in your body,

and everything around you is sending a signal

that you are disgusting in some way,

that you have to be separated from healthy people.

That seems like the most astonishing

psychological burden.

NARRATOR: Across the West,

communities that had once lured health seekers

now scrambled to keep them out.

Several Western states sought to enact laws

to stop people with coughs from crossing their borders.

Others looked for ways to remove them from populated areas.

ROTHMAN: They often set up tent cities on the edge of town.

So the sheriff would take them, drop them off in this tent city,

and most people were kind of having to fend for themselves,

and other people who had tuberculosis

who weren't so sick would help them,

and some charitable people would bring food and so on,

but they were isolated and indigent

and really, really unwelcome.

NARRATOR: Even Charles Willard was not immune.

When his symptoms became impossible to hide,

he also became a target.

After his home accidentally burned to the ground,

no one would rent him a place to live.

In cities across the country,

public officials began to call for government intervention.

Health departments primarily concerned

with preventing diseases carried in the water supply

now had to confront a deadly illness

spread through the most casual of contact.

TOMES: Public health officials

felt they had to conduct a massive national campaign

to bring the news to everyone in the United States.

In fact, it's the first mass public health campaign

in American history.

There's nothing like it before.

The campaign to teach every single American

that they needed to be careful

about how they coughed and sneezed

because you could never tell who was sick and who wasn't.

ROTHMAN: And they pass these brochures out

so that people could understand

that spitting could spread the disease.

Coughing without a handkerchief could spread the disease.

They promoted the use of Kleenex.

I mean, this is how Kleenex came about.

Women's hemlines start to go up after .

It was so you could get your skirts out of the dirt

and not carry home a load of germs into your house.

Men's style of wearing beards changed.

The anti-TB handouts would say, "Get rid of your whiskers,"

because you don't want to kiss the baby or kiss your wife

and give them tuberculosis with your beard germs.

NARRATOR: Crowded neighborhoods transformed

as parks and playgrounds were built to provide urban dwellers

with islands of fresh air.

New Yorkers began to call Central Park

"the lungs of the city."

By the early decades of the th century,

improved hygiene started bringing

the overall cases of TB down.

But in poor, crowded neighborhoods,

the figures continued to climb.

In some cities,

immigrants were twice as likely to die of the disease

than their more affluent neighbors.

For African Americans,

the death rate was three to four times higher.

ROTHMAN: And suddenly you have a new understanding

of why it is a disease of the poor and the immigrant.

They are living in places without ventilation.

They are working together in crowded sweatshops.

So it kind of feeds on itself:

a new understanding of the disease,

and the whole beginnings of policies

to try to lessen the impact

and reduce the spread of the disease.

NARRATOR: Public health officials began to call

for improving the lives of the poorest Americans:

better housing and working conditions,

reduced working hours and child labor laws.

Yet the anti-TB campaign gave government officials

unprecedented power to police the sick.

Health inspectors were instructed

to monitor people's movements, inspect their homes

or commit them to ill-equipped public institutions,

often against their will.

TOMES: The pressure from public health officials

to segregate the very sick fell most heavily

on working class, poor Americans,

immigrant Americans.

They did not go knocking on doors on th Avenue asking,

"Do you have any consumptives in the house?"

There was a sense if you were wealthy,

you were going to be allowed to manage your illness

however you wanted to.

It was the poorer people

who really felt the pressure from public heath officials

to make their sick relatives leave the home

and go into one of these institutional facilities.

NARRATOR: "Sanitary measures are sometimes autocratic,"

declared a prominent health official.

"We are prepared to enforce measures

"which might seem radical

if they were not designed for the public good."

TOMES: It's an area of public health practice where increasingly,

the need of the community to be protected from the illness

starts to trump the individual rights of the patient.

When people say, "I don't want to be taken away,"

their right to resist that is overridden

in the name of public health.

BARRETT: How do we ever live with a contagion in our midst?

Someone is sick among us, that person needs care and help,

that person is also contagious and can give us what they have.

What is the balance between taking care of the community

and taking care of the person?

That question's always with us,

and it almost never has a good answer.

NARRATOR: With each passing year,

hundreds of thousands of Americans with tuberculosis

scrambled to find medical care.

Hospitals were overwhelmed.

To cope with the flood of patients,

New York City's Bellevue Hospital

transformed ferry barges into makeshift wards.

BARRETT: There was no room to put people who had tuberculosis.

So this was one way to separate out contagious people,

was to take all the consumptives from a local neighborhood

and put them onto these day camps,

and they'd spend the whole day on their little chairs

in the barge moored on the river.

It was just a way of keeping them out of their rooms

and their rooming houses and out of their workplaces.

Some of the hospitals would only take people

who were in their first attack

because they didn't want to take people who were dying.

They weren't in the business of caring for the dying.

So sometimes you had to change your name,

pretend you were someone different,

go to a different hospital.

It became a game of trying to figure out how to survive

and how to make it when you really had no resources.

NARRATOR: Years earlier, Edward Trudeau told friends

that he wished more people could find relief,

as he had done, in the cool, fresh climate

of the Adirondacks.

He had begun reading about European sanatoriums--

facilities built in the countryside

that provided long-term care for TB patients.

COOPER: Edward Trudeau was familiar with the treatments

that were occurring in Europe at the time,

and there was a growing idea

that one should take people who have tuberculosis

and take them into an environment

that was perhaps different from the environment they were in.

And one of the ideas that they had

was that they would go out into the country.

They would be resting, they would be given good food,

and they would be exposed to the sunlight.

So the idea of the sanatorium was to create a place

where people who had been infected

could rally their body's healing forces to throw it off.

We, today, talk about the immune system.

They didn't use that language,

but it's clearly the phenomena that they were describing.

NARRATOR: Trudeau was determined to build

the first tuberculosis sanatorium in the United States.

He had grown friendly

with wealthy TB patients from the city

and now urged them to open their wallets

to help create a treatment facility

for people of modest means.

HOTALING: The people who came originally were wealthy patients.

They were the people who could afford to take a difficult trip

through the wilderness to get here,

and then they could hire a place to stay, in a hotel,

or rent a house or build a house,

but Trudeau felt that there ought to be a place

for people who were not so well off.

That's why he founded the sanatorium.

NARRATOR: By , Trudeau's sanatorium would grow

into a sprawling campus of buildings,

including a church and a research laboratory.

News of its success spread so quickly,

medical professionals flocked to Saranac Lake

to see it for themselves.

Trudeau ignited a movement.

Over the next decade, hundreds of sanatoriums would spring up

in every part of the country,

many of them set up by charity or religious groups.

State governments opened huge complexes for people

who couldn't afford care in private institutions.

Many facilities were segregated by race.

African Americans barred from white-only sanatoriums

helped start their own.

In the first decades of the th century,

one out of every Americans lived in a sanatorium,

some for many years.

It was a life of exile.

WHITNEY SEYMOUR, JR.: I began to realize that I was getting extremely tired

and then started coughing up phlegm.

And so I made an appointment to go see the family doctor.

And he saw the tubular bacilli right away

and he said, "Young man, you have tuberculosis,

and you gotta go to Trudeau."

He didn't fool around, saying, "You can think about it."

He was very adamant.

And all of a sudden, it was all over

and I was now suddenly being told to,

"Get yourself on a train and get up to the mountains

"and start curing.

You're a very sick young man."

ROTHMAN: People often left in the middle of the night.

They left without telling people.

They just quit their jobs or they just left.

Sometimes they were trying to protect their families,

and sometimes the families were trying to protect themselves.

NARRATOR: For some, the sanatorium held the promise of cure.

For others, it was the place to go to die.

The white-coated doctors coming in and looking down,

saying, "Mm-hmm, uh-huh," and walking out.

And so I would figure these guys were measuring me for a coffin.

I was left there in a hospital bed

and I really was overwhelmed by a sense of despair.

I really thought that I was about to die.

The hardest time was accepting that I was there

and maintaining hope that I would get better

and being optimistic.

So it was a separation from your usual life

that really was very hard to take.

You were really basically lonely.

JOANNE CURTIS: They never told me how long I would be at the hospital,

and I never asked.

Don't ask me why.

I never cried, I never asked.

I just took one day at a time, kept my sense of humor,

and that was it.

That was my armament, that was it.

NARRATOR: Entering a sanatorium required complete submission.

Physicians and nurses regulated every moment of the day,

measuring patients' progress towards health

by testing for bacteria in their phlegm

and x-raying their chests.

Trudeau believed TB patients needed to be well fed

and insisted they consume at least six glasses of milk

and six raw eggs a day.

And he ordered them to rest.

BARRETT: When people first came to a sanatorium,

many were put on -hour rest.

They were put directly to bed.

They stayed there.

All their meals were brought to bed on trays.

They were not allowed to even get out to go to the bathroom.

They had bedpans.

CURTIS: Class One was bed rest.

Class Two, bathroom privileges only.

Three, I could walk around a lot.

By the time I got to Two, I was restless.

I got yelled at by my doctor

because I would be ripping up and down the hallway,

and he said, "Young lady, aren't you in Class Two?

You're supposed to just have bathroom privileges."

And I said, "Oh, I didn't know that."

He said, "Yes, you did.

Go back to your bed."

So that's... yes, I did.

NARRATOR: For Trudeau, where his patients rested

was as significant as how long.

He was convinced that fresh air

was the single most important treatment for a diseased lung.

He instructed his patients

to lie outdoors on reclining chairs,

day and night, regardless of the weather.

SHERWOOD DAVIES: I'd sleep at night on the porch, get fresh air.

[laughing]

That's what they called it.

When it was ten below,

it was a little more than fresh air.

Damn cold weather.

But I would have an electric blanket

and I'd have about four or five other blankets

over the electric blanket,

and then a rubber sheet over that,

and then a wool cap over my ears.

SEYMOUR: The cure cottage that I was assigned to

was not an outdoor cure cottage, but glassed in.

That is, I slept outside the building,

but you could see nature all around you.

And the thing that I still remember

was the sunlight bouncing off Mount Marcy

and then streaming in through these windows

and making it just very cheerful and hopeful

and make you begin to think,

"Gee, it'd be nice to be out there."

NARRATOR: With no treatment available other than rest and fresh air,

tuberculosis sufferers everywhere

strived to imitate Trudeau's method.

Across the country, people added porches to their homes.

When that wasn't possible, they simply made do.

BARRETT: There were tents on the roofs

of some tenement buildings all over Brooklyn,

a cure chair inside,

and someone wrapped in all their hats and clothes.

And then there were also tents

that could be inserted into a window

so that if you were in your apartment house,

your legs would be inside the house

and the white tent would stick out the window,

and somehow the fresh air was supposed to come into you,

just from your head sticking out the window.

NARRATOR: For all they surrendered

when they entered the sanatorium,

patients also found a certain freedom.

Unburdened from the fear of infecting others,

they sought comfort in each other's company.

ROTHMAN: In these situations, there was a great deal of gossip.

Everybody gossiped about everybody else:

who's talking to who,

who's trying to run away and drink,

who left, and also, who died.

BARRETT: Even if you're out on the porch and it's a sunny day

and you're having conversation with a friend

or flirting with someone,

just a few beds or a few rooms away,

someone else is coughing horribly

or having a horrible hemorrhage

that's being cleaned up within your sight,

or a body's being taken down the corridor on a gurney.

I think the presence of death had to be with you

virtually every minute of every day.

DAVIES: I remember two young ladies, very personable,

and I was in my teenagers

and these were attractive young girls,

and I got to know them--

Ruth Templeton and Mary Patterson.

And within four to six months of their arrival,

both of them had died, which...

It troubled me no end.

Two young ladies like that that developed the disease.

I still remember their names to this day.

It's...

It was very unfortunate.

NARRATOR: Trudeau's own studies revealed

that only a third of his patients got well.

He stood at the bedside of hundreds of dying patients,

but the hardest death to bear was that of his own daughter.

Charlotte Trudeau died of tuberculosis at the age of .

The doctor was rarely free of symptoms himself,

frequently having to stop work to take the rest cure.

When Edward Trudeau died in

after a -year struggle with tuberculosis,

a miracle cure was still a dream.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Through mass production methods,

America is continually increasing

its output of penicillin,

the new drug that effects almost miraculous cures.

The liquid charged with penicillin

is poured from the bottles.

Turned into a powder, it is ready for use.

NARRATOR: In the early s, the discovery of penicillin

revolutionized the treatment of infectious diseases.

Derived from a mold, this first antibiotic

cured a host of infections, but not tuberculosis.

A microbiologist at Rutgers University

believed he knew where to look for an antibiotic that would,

literally beneath people's feet.

Selman Waksman was one of the few people in the country

who understood the true nature of soil.

Early in his career, he had written a definitive work

on the microscopic organisms that live in the ground,

describing the earth in an ordinary garden

as a k*lling field

where warrior microbes fight each other for supremacy.

His previous work pointed to the Streptomyces:

strange organisms, half bacteria and half fungi,

responsible for the sweet odor of earth after a light rain.

But there are over different species.

Finding one that could k*ll harmful bacteria

without toxic side effects

would prove to be extraordinarily difficult.

And it was unbelievably time consuming

and, if you like, boring, and you could look all day long

and see absolutely nothing happening

through your microscope.

So you go to a different soil patch,

maybe you go closer to the horse's stables

because the bacteria that you really want

are those which feed on horse dung

rather than dried leaves.

So it's a huge hit-and-miss affair.

NARRATOR: In late summer ,

Waksman assigned the research project to Albert Schatz,

an energetic -year-old graduate student.

The hunt for antibiotics captured Schatz's imagination.

He would often spend hours a day

peering into his microscope,

looking for the telltale sign of an antibiotic.

In what was known as "the streak test,"

Schatz placed common bacteria in a Petri dish,

swiping a strain of Streptomyces down the middle.

If the strain were potent enough,

it would create a dead zone around it.

PRINGLE: It's a b*ttlefield,

and the clear zone gets bigger and bigger,

and eventually,

you're watching it destroy your harmful bacteria

and you say, "Whoopee, I've got something!"

NARRATOR: Three months in,

Schatz stumbled on a variety that appeared quite powerful.

On October , he sealed a test tube

containing the promising batch

and gave it to his mother as a memento of his achievement.

Schatz was eager to test the new antibiotic against tuberculosis,

even given the risk.

VIVIAN SCHATZ: That laboratory was not set up

for a dangerous germ like tuberculosis.

So there were a couple of basement windows

and some stools to sit on, and that was it.

It was very sparse,

and not what you would expect

where people would be working with a very virulent organism.

PRINGLE: And the equipment is very primitive.

It's not exactly clean.

There was none of the stuff that you see today

of, you know, enclosed labs where people are manipulating

their Petri dishes with mechanical arms.

It was nothing like that.

NARRATOR: Schatz talked Waksman into letting him proceed.

VIVIAN SCHATZ: He slept in the laboratory because he had to add fluid

to the glass containers that were being distilled,

and when the liquid in a container

got to a certain level, he had to add more liquid.

So it was very, very tiring, hard work.

NARRATOR: Within weeks, Schatz would witness

one of the most dramatic events ever seen under a microscope:

the destruction of the tubercle bacillus.

Waksman and Schatz named the antibiotic "streptomycin."

The following spring, Waksman sent the drug to the Mayo Clinic

for testing with patients.

Starting in November of ,

researchers gave five courses of streptomycin

to a -year-old woman dying of tuberculosis.

Within days, the infection in her lungs began to disappear.

A few months later, she was discharged from the hospital.

So with streptomycin,

for the first time in human history,

there's a magic b*llet.

There's a drug you can give to people

that is going to make the majority of them

far, far better.

You can cure tuberculosis.

ROTHMAN: I mean, it was unbelievable.

A disease that had plagued humanity for , years

was suddenly able to be cured.

DAVIES: The medical director assembled all the patients

and all the staff

and announced this drug that they had just discovered.

And what a reaction from the patients there that...

I mean, you could see the smiles on their face.

Well, it... it was indescribable.

NARRATOR: The euphoria would not last.

Within months of treatment, many patients began to relapse.

Scientists would come to understand that streptomycin

does not destroy all the bacteria in the body,

and the organisms that do survive

grow stronger and more resistant to the drug.

Suddenly, the drug was not being effective

when it had been so effective so quickly.

And so they understood very rapidly that it was...

the resistance was occurring.

And so they needed to develop further drugs.

NARRATOR: By the late s,

two additional drugs were added to streptomycin.

The drug c*ck, properly administered,

was far more effective.

COOPER: And with tuberculosis, it's clear.

You need a combination of drugs.

So the bacteria has to combat two or three attacks at once

rather than the simple one attack.

It can cope with one, it can't cope with two,

and it can cope even less well with three.

And then when we take the antibiotics,

we need to take them consistently, correctly,

not overdo it and not underdo it,

because then you will facilitate the development

of drug resistance.

NARRATOR: Before antibiotics, half of all people with active TB

could expect to die within five years.

By , most were getting well

and going on to live normal, healthy lives.

As cures mounted, the sanatoriums began to close.

Many were demolished.

A few became ski resorts or hotels.

SEYMOUR: Almost from the very beginning, when I was in the infirmary,

these young doctors came by and say,

"We're going to experiment with these new drugs."

And so it was then quite obvious

that Trudeau was going to close in a few weeks.

And we're instructed to go find apartments in town

so we could continue to get well.

And all of a sudden, I realized I can overcome it

and live a long, healthy, hardworking life.

DAVIES: I had looked back at the family's history of tuberculosis

and said how lucky I was.

And when they said I was essentially cured, I was elated.

I wasn't thinking so much of a big relief on my part

but what my mother had gone through,

because here she was,

she had dealt with her mother, she had dealt with my father,

and now she had to deal with me.

I think the proudest thing in her life

was when she came to my college graduation.

[voice breaking]: And...

she...

Her life was fulfilled.

NARRATOR: In November ,

a former professional baseball player named Larry Doyle

ate his last meal

at the head of a long table at the Trudeau Sanatorium.

He had been a patient for years.

After lunch, he walked out the front door

and strolled through the snowy streets of Saranac Lake.

He was the last tuberculosis patient to leave Trudeau.