A patient with latent or inactive TB harbors the bacteria, though it remains inactive and presents no symptoms. Active TB impairs the patient with weight loss, fatigue, fever, night sweats, chills, a cough that lasts more than three weeks, coughing up blood and respiratory pain. Tuberculosis attacking other organs causes different symptoms depending on the organs affected. The ancient Greeks and other European physicians remained most impressed with the wasting of the body---and discovered ulcer like lesions in the organs only after autopsy.
The Great White Plague swept Europe in the 17th century, killing thousands for 200 years. English physician Benjamin Martin became the first to publish ideas about microscopic beings, though he described them as "wonderfully minute living creatures" in 1720. At the time, doctors still defined TB as phthisis, or consumption, and sometimes as scrofula for the swellings of the lymph nodes. According to the University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey (UMDNJ), Martin became the first to associate spreading TB with close society---sharing beds, meals or close proximity with consumptives.
Hermann Brenner, botanist and tuberculosis patient, traveled to the Himalayas with a twofold purpose: to study and to take advantage of cleaner air. He returned to Germany cured of his consumption. In 1854 he published his theories on defeating TB, and opened the first tuberculosis sanatorium. Brenner prescribed good nutrition and a healthy mountain climate. He became the first to battle the Great White Plague with any success.
French Army physician Jean-Antoine Villemin furthered Martin's contagion theories by illustrating how TB passes from a human to a bovine, and then on to a rabbit in 1865. The UMDNJ cites this endeavor as the critical step in finally denying the spontaneous generation theories of the times. Villemin presented proof of how the disease spread from organism to organism, labeling the disease a contagion.
It took 145 years from Martin's initial speculations to Villemin's more concrete proof, and then almost two more decades before German biologist Robert Koch positively identified the tubercle bacillus. Once successful in identification though, Koch failed in his attempts at immunization. However, physicians later used Koch's isolation of a protein in the tubercles for TB skin tests. Three years later, in 1895, fellow German Wilhelm Konrad von Roentgen discovered X-rays, allowing doctors to plot the disease's destruction of a human body. By this time 70 to 90 percent of urban populations in Europe had TB while 80 percent of those infected died of the disease.
Though physicians wrestled with and defeated consumption for a time over the last two centuries, TB now returns even more resistant than ever to today's drugs. The nineties sparked the beginning of the new epidemic with rates of infection peaking in 2004. The World Health Organization states over 4,000 people die from tuberculosis daily.