Must reading: how science happens. Why is it out of print?

books:

	• The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won - And Lost Frank Ryan Back Bay Books, 1994 - 488 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Entertaining & fascinating at the same time!

This book really gives the inside story about Tuberculosis or "Consumption" as it has been known for centuries. The first chapter was a little slow and preachy, but by the 3rd chapter the author really takes off with fascinating details and glimpses into the horrible suffering of TB victims. Bless the memory of all those nameless souls who died of this dreadful, perplexing, and still 'consuming' disease. Truly a sad story in the annals of medicine, and a deeper look at our mortal vulnerability to the invisible microbes that threaten our lives daily. We think we have found all the answers in our super technical, scientifically advanced generation, but this book proves that we are vastly outnumbered in our battle with lethal diseases such as TB, AIDS, SARS, and certain cancers. As long as their is life there will be suffering, and this book offers a closer look at that undesirable but certain reality.

for more information click here

Simply amazing!!

As a lung doctor coming from a country where tuberculosis is a common disease I thought this book was going to be interesting. I was wrong. It was fascinating! I made the mistake of start reading it while I was working on some professional projects. The result was several nights of poor sleep just because I started my reading after finishing my work late at night and I just could not stop reading it! I am going to buy several copies for some of my coleagues. This is a great book

for more information click here

Superb Book on How Science Saved Lives

This book should be required reading for our schools! It shows how people communicated ideas and progress on the cure for tuberculosis and made incredible discoveries! It reads like a novel and is superb!

for more information click here

A valient effort

Frank Ryan writes overly long about the attempts to fight tuberculosis. Admittedly, Ryan is no historian. His work bounces along from one aspect of the stuggle to another, while only the most tenuous relation is suggested. He bogs down in the details of tangential aspects of the story and it is only in reflective hindsight that one begins to find continuity.

Ryan's book traces the many threads of research that produced ever-increasing breakthroughs in controlling tuberculosis; the researchers involved operated more or less independently, unaware of each other's existence and progress, thus affording little opportunity for cooperation.

Ryan's complicated story of the many contributions to tuberculosis research perhaps seems mildly disheartening. The search for treatments for tuberculosis spread across a far greater geography and period of time. The presentation of these various groups researching tuberculosis, brought together in a single tome with decades of work artificially telescoped into a few hundred pages, blurs the reality that researchers at the time did not see the opportunities for cooperation with the clarity of hindsight. In fairness, Ryan did try to present scientists laboring, incognizant of each other's work, isolated by oceans and political ideologies. However the petty struggles and backstabbing over patent rights, royalties and scientific prestige suggest baser motives than one would like to attribute to persons engaged in saving mankind from a deadly disease.