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THE REMEDY
Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure TB
Thomas Goetz
The riveting history of the world’s most lethal
disease, the two men whose lives it tragically
intertwined, and the birth of medical science
In 1875, tuberculosis was the deadliest disease in the world, accountable for a third
of all deaths. A diagnosis of TB—often called consumption—was a death sentence.
Then, in a triumph of medical science, a German doctor named Robert Koch deployed
an unprecedented scientific rigor to discover the bacteria that caused TB and soon
embarked on a remedy—a remedy that would be his undoing.
When Koch announced he’d found a cure, Arthur Conan Doyle, then a small-town
doctor in England and sometime writer, went to Berlin to cover the event. Touring the
ward of reportedly cured patients, he was horrified. Koch’s “remedy” was either sloppy
science or outright fraud.
But to those desperate for relief, Koch’s cure was worth the risk. As Europe’s
consumptives descended upon Berlin, Conan Doyle returned to England to become a
writer, not a scientist. But he brought Koch’s scientific methods to the masses through
the character of Sherlock Holmes.
Capturing the moment when mystery and magic began to yield to science, The
Remedy chronicles the stunning story of how the germ theory of disease became fact,
how two men of ambition were emboldened to reach for something more, and how
scientific discoveries evolve into social truths.
EXCERPT | In nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, consumption was the most
common of all ways to die. Tuberculosis was a chameleon of diseases, easily mistaken or
dismissed as something else for years. Even when diagnosed properly, it was a languid, almost
casual disease—the first chronic disease, in many respects. As such, few doctors believed that
there could be anything contagious about it whatsoever. Rather, it seemed largely hereditary,
passed along in families with weak constitutions by nature.
As for treatments, there was no end of them: tonics and salves and Dr. Williams’s cod liver
oil. In truth, there was no true remedy for tuberculosis, no tonic that would dispatch the
disease and restore the individual. Some doctors despaired that there would ever be a cure
for the disease and felt that any offer of treatments was deceitful and unethical. They chose
not to treat it as a disease but rather as a fact of life, counseling patients to learn to live with
the condition as long as they might. Rather than scrounge for a cure, they should reconcile
themselves to the fact that their fate had been cast. Whether brought on by God or family,
consumption was their lot.
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