Once upon a time, people thought tuberculosis was caused by vampires.
Listen to the podcast here:
In 1892, the Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island, had been devastated by a mysterious wasting illness. Several family members had died, and another, Edwin Brown, was getting sicker.
Neighbors began to suspect something supernatural.
They believed one of Edwin’s dead relatives might be returning from the grave and draining the life from him.
What happened next involved three exhumed bodies, a surprisingly well preserved corpse, a burned heart and liver, and one truly horrifying homemade remedy.
The real culprit?
Tuberculosis.
And the Brown family wasn’t alone. Tuberculosis, once known as consumption, became tangled up with vampire folklore at a time when people had no idea what caused the disease or why it seemed to move relentlessly through families.
That’s where this episode of Public Health Is Weird begins.
But the story gets much bigger than vampires.
I get into how tuberculosis earned names like “consumption” and “the White Plague,” the strange period when wasting away from TB somehow became fashionable, and the discovery that finally revealed what was really haunting these families.
There’s also the surprisingly messy story behind the first effective antibiotic for tuberculosis, complete with a young graduate student, a fight over credit, money, a lawsuit, and a Nobel Prize.
Turns out, even in microbiology, nerds can play dirty.
And then there’s the part of the story I find most interesting.
Why do humans reach for supernatural explanations when reality doesn’t make sense?
There is psychological research suggesting that when people feel a loss of control, they may become more likely to perceive patterns and connections that aren’t actually there.
That raises an interesting question for public health.
Spiritual and supernatural beliefs can sometimes lead people away from effective medical treatment. But science also has limits. It can tell us what it can observe, test, and measure. It can’t necessarily tell us what exists beyond those boundaries.
So what should medicine and public health do when someone’s understanding of illness includes a spiritual realm that science can’t evaluate?
I don’t have a tidy answer.
But vampires, tuberculosis, human psychology, scientific discovery, a Nobel Prize controversy, and my great great grandfather’s apparent belief in the medicinal powers of groundhog grease seemed like a pretty good place to start.
Listen to the full episode of Public Health Is Weird here!
*******************************************************************************
Check out other Public Health is weird podcast episodes or short reels here! :)
Sign up for The Eeks Weekly! :)
Sources used in this podcast listed below:
Food for the Dead, by Michael Bell
Mysterious, medieval child vampire, The Independent
Consumptive Chic, by Carolyn Day
Smithsonian Magazine, Kat Eschner, March, 2017
CDC MMWR, 1982
Streptomycin, American Chemical Society, 2014
World’s Top Infectious Killer, Science Alert, 2025