Cod and the consumptive: a brief history of cod-liver oil in the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis.

Abstract

Tuberculosis ravaged the Western world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was the chief cause of mortality among the epidemic diseases.1 Increases in population, urbanization and crowding, plus diets low in vitamins, proteins, and calories all may have fueled the tuberculosis epidemic in nineteenth-century Europe and America.2 While the disease affects many of the organs of the body, pulmonary tuberculosis caused the greatest burden of chronic disease and mortality in the population and attracted the most attention.3 Pulmonary tuberculosis is characterized by cough, sputum production, fever, night sweats, weight loss, and eventual hemoptysis (coughing blood). Characteristic nodules, called tubercles, appear in the lungs; these eventually progress to cavitary disease and loss of lung tissue. Over time, weight loss becomes striking, and patients become emaciated, weak, and pale; hence the disease was called or phthisis, the Greek term for wasting. Although an acute, rapidly progressive, and fatal form of the disease occurred, known as galloping consumption, the disease was characteristically chronic, with