After The Times published an interview with John Green about his new book on tuberculosis, many readers wrote to share their families’ history with the disease.
Recently, the writer John Green spoke with The New York Times about his best-selling book “Everything Is Tuberculosis” and the reason he developed an obsessive interest in the disease, which kills more people worldwide than any other infectious illness does. Tuberculosis has been rare in the United States for decades, but the conversation inspired many readers to write in to share their own families’ history with the disease.
Here are excerpts from several.
My mother, Babe, had TB in the early 1930s and was put in the Grasslands sanitarium in Valhalla, N.Y. She survived because her doctor gave her pneumothorax treatment, collapsing one lung at a time, to let the lung rest and repair. She said it was very painful. I was told the story over and over. She was so afraid I would get TB.
One reason she lived is because she had met my father, Grant, on a trip to California and fallen in love. He wrote to her everyday and even said he would go east, climb the walls of the sanitarium and take her to the clean air of the mountains in California so she could get well. Grant was a writer and a stuntman in Hollywood. He had been Errol Flynn’s double in “Robin Hood.” So he really meant it when he said he’d climb the walls to get her out.
He didn’t do that. But when Babe recovered, she took a train to California and married my father. Babe’s doctor was Dr. William Godfrey Childress, whom I have since found out was one of the well-known TB experts in those days. I met him when she went in for a checkup many years later. (I was born when Babe was 44!)
— Wyn Lydecker