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as so many did, they were sent home. And when they returned to their villages, they spread the disease to their families.
The textile factories' reputation became so bad even people desparate for a job refused to work there. The factories were forced to send recruiters to more and more remote cities, and this helped spread the disease far and wide, A great epidemic began. Between 1910 and 1950 six million people were to die of tuberculoiss in Japan, at a time when the country's population ranged from 50 to 93 million. By the end of these years, hardly a family in the entire nation was not touched by this disease.
SEAWEED, SAXOPHONES, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS
For the six thousand years that we know peopl have had tuberculosis, its has been only during the past fifty that medical science could help them at all. However, even with no treatment, sometimes people got better on their own. This meant that over the years that they were ill, people might try something, such as Laennec's seaweed treatmetn, and sometimes would happen to get better. But it was difficult to tell with a slow-moving disease whether a treatment really helped or only seemed to help.
Over the thousands of years of the history off tuberculosis, thousands of things have seemed to work. For a bloody cough, people have taken sulfur, garlic, quince, endive, cabbage, and burnt lungs of vulture mixed with lily blossoms and wine. For a cough, they have tried the herbs horehound and dill, boiled crocodile, and a lukewarm bath in urine taken from persons who had just eaten cabbage. Tuberculosis sufferers have ingested quinine, tea, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, cod-liver oil, and opium. They have been bled, blistered, and made to vomit. They have rubbed human fat on their tubercular necks. People have ingested twelve eggs a day, lobster, milk from highland goats, milk from asses, and milk from humans. They have been force-fed, and they have been starved. Some patients have been ordered to lie flat and still, forbidden even to so much as talk or laugh; others have been told to ride horseback six hours a day, to ski, to spin in revolving chairs until they were nauseous. Adolphe Sax, who invented the saxophone, claimed that playing the instruments staved off consumption. Others swore swinging on a swing was the answer.
Kings and queens of France and England from the Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century laid their hands on people suffering from tuberculosis of the lymph nodes and were said to heal them. This type of tuberculosis infection, known as scrofula, causes the neck to swell in two great bulges below the corners of the jaw, and then open in foul-smelling sores. Left untreated, the disease could spread onto the face. Though not fatal, it was horribly disfiguring, and people would travel on foot from the farthest corners of the kingdom to be touched by the King. Sometimes, on their weeks- or months-long journey back home, the scrofula.