Summary and Reviews of The Remedy by Thomas Goetz

The Remedy by Thomas Goetz

The Remedy

Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis

by Thomas Goetz
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  • Critics' Consensus (7):
  • First Published:
  • Apr 3, 2014, 320 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Mar 2015, 320 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

The riveting history of tuberculosis, 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. Koch soon embarked on a remedy - a remedy that would be his undoing.

When Koch announced his cure for consumption, 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 a world desperate for relief, Koch's remedy wasn't so easily dismissed. As Europe's consumptives descended upon Berlin, Koch urgently tried to prove his case. Conan Doyle, meanwhile, returned to England determined to abandon medicine in favor of writing. In particular, he turned to a character inspired by the very scientific methods that Koch had formulated: 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 a true fact, how two men of ambition were emboldened to reach for something more, and how scientific discoveries evolve into social truths.

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Reviews

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The Remedy is well-paced: it reads like mystery or true crime, not like a history book. The link between Koch and Doyle can occasionally feel somewhat tenuous; the author surely makes more metaphorical use of it than their actual historical intersection can support. If his window on the past feels slightly narrow, however, he still makes good on his dual purpose of tracing both the history of TB and the development of the scientific method through medicine and fiction...continued

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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).

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Beyond the Book



Tuberculosis and...Sherlock Holmes

Did you know?

Schatzalp Sanatorium
  • At its height tuberculosis killed 1 in 7 people
  • According to Thomas Goetz in The Remedy, TB may have been "the most lethal disease in history, having claimed more than a billion lives since it was first identified in ancient Greece"
  • Two-thirds of active cases of TB would end in death
  • TB, like anthrax, is believed to have originated with agriculture about 9,000 years ago: springing from the soil and passing through the vectors of meat and milk
  • The pasteurization process, which kills off bacteria in milk, reduced the spread of TB
  • In the nineteenth century TB was believed to be caused by "miasma" (bad air) or heredity; only later was the cause revealed to be bacterial (Mycobacterium tuberculosis)
  • Through history, TB ...

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