1. One Dr Snow of San Francisco established California's annual financial loss due to tuberculosis to be $31 000 000.00 in 1911. See his Tuberculosis in California: The Development of a State Policy in its Control, California Department of Public Health (Sacramento 1934) 22.
2. The primary reason was of course the discovery of the tubercle bacillus by Robert Koch in 1882, and the gradual acceptance of tuberculosis as a contagious disease. Another reason—less discussed but certainly important in the San Francisco case—was the eventual subsidence of those more virulent epidemic diseases such as smallpox and cholera. Despite much lower death tolls compared to tuberculosis, these diseases demanded more attention from public health departments because of the alacrity with which they spread and because of the horrible symptoms and rapid agonizing deaths they caused. By the turn of the century these diseases were finally on the wane, enabling health departments to concentrate their resources more fully upon tuberculosis.
3. According to Dubos, surveys conducted in the early part of the century found that “almost all members of the adult population in European and American cities were tuberculin positive”. See R. Dubos and J. Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (New Brunswick 1952) 122. Calculating rates of tuberculosis was as problematic as calculating HIV rates today—it was done primarily through targeting particular populations (a school or office) and extrapolating from there to the general population.
4. N. Rose, Medicine, history and the present, in C. Jones and R. Porter (Eds), Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body (New York 1994) 51.
5. D. Armstrong, Political Anatomy of the Body: Medical Knowledge in Britain in the 20th Century (Cambridge 1983).