Doc Holliday Is Dead But Tuberculosis Is Still Killing Us

In 2002, David M. Morens, now Senior Scientific Advisor at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, wrote an essay called “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art.” It featured a photograph he took of Robert Louis Stevenson’s resting place atop Mount Vaea on Upolu, an island in Western Samoa. In 1894, at 44, Stevenson, author of and , succumbed to a stroke after years of climbing hills and sailing oceans, searching, on medical advice, for a climate suitable to his tuberculosis. Morens fulfilled one of his boyhood dreams visiting Stevenson’s tomb. “I reflected then that in 1891, when Stevenson had escaped to Upolu, tuberculosis was still a disease of wealthy industrial nations,” Morens wrote. “To run from it, Stevenson had to leave behind everything else in his life: family, friends, mother country, home, comfort. He fled to the very end of the earth.”