Helen Bynum

This is a lovely book. I really enjoyed reading it. I have dabbled with botanical painting myself and have been most curious about how other artists went about their work. Well here we have many examples of the rough, field sketches that artists made and also their finished works so one can get some idea of the process. But it's not comprehensive. I suspect the there were probably many intermediate sketches made of most of the finished works plus small aside sketches of a particular leaf or petal to get the shape, shading and colour right.
Some 84 artists are covered and they only get a few pages each...but it's enough to get some background text about the artist plus some of their sketches and, usually, some of their finished or near finished work. I loved may of the half finished works...part in graphite and part finished.
I think all the works are in watercolour and some of the artists have shown a masterful usage of watercolour. (Notably the Scott sisters and the incomparable Ferdinand Bauer). And Harry Church's work is also extraordinary. But I also likes seeing the sketch by Alfred Russel Wallace of the Amazon Jungle and sketches by Helen Faulkner which consist of pencil sketches only part coloured so the one can see her working technique..plus the notes she took. Many of the artist's sketchbooks were similar.
Anyway, a lovely book which I never tired dipping into. Five stars from me.… (más)

This book, part of Oxford University Press's series on "biographies" of diseases, highlights one disease the haunted humankind for millennia - tuberculosis/consumption. This battle, like its infectious disease brethren of malaria and yellow fever, is as old as recorded civilization. Like most infectious diseases, it has become a victim of its success in that its prevalence is now only among some of the "less desirables" of humanity: The developing world, the homeless, those with HIV/AIDS, and displaced persons.

As with malaria, one can wonder whether tuberculosis (in its MDRTB form - multi-drug resistant tuberculosis) might make a "comeback" someday in the form of a epidemic in the West. All that it would take is a little lackadaisical behavior on the part of a few public health centers in urban environments. Educational works like Bynum's help combat such human tendencies by keeping us aware of these challenges.

Current therapy involves direct observation of ingestion of four medicines which have significant side effects. Communities like immigrants, who face the double whammy of coming from countries with endemic TB and of living in crowded environments which are conducive to TB, can benefit from a dose of preventative medicine in being coached how to be sanitary when living in close quarters.… (más)

This book started out very strongly with a brief account of George Orwell's experience with tuberculosis, but I found that it went a little downhill after that. It became fairly dry and technical. I was expecting it to pick up steam when the author got to the recognition of germ theory in the tuberculosis timeline, but it really didn't. I was hoping for more personal accounts of the disease, and while there were some, those accounts made up only a very small fraction of the book.

A few pros and cons:

Pros: The book is well-organized. I never felt "lost" in the timeline of this history of tuberculosis. It also explains in great detail the various phases of tuberculosis treatment, beginning with some of the more ridiculous so-called remedies before the arrival of modern medicine, progressing through the sanitarium phase, and ending with some of the modern approaches to the disease and the influence of drug resistance in modern treatment. The author also discusses the changing perception of tuberculosis, including the periods of time when TB or TB-like symptoms were considered almost fashionable and the role of TB in the eugenics movement.

Cons: Like I said above, pretty dry and a little too technical. I am not a medical professional, and while I found the book to be understandable, some of the nuances of the disease or the development of a TB antibiotic were extremely boring to me. (And I do not bore easily - I have read other books about disease and have largely found the science to be interesting, but this time I couldn't muster up a lot of excitement for it.) In fairness, part of the reason the book and the science discussion felt boring to me may be due to the fact that TB is a chronic disease and not usually acute, so the the disease tends to be protracted, whereas other illnesses I have read about (ebola, smallpox) are shorter-lived but very intense.

Another con is that the editing (on the Kindle version at least) was a little lacking. I noticed a lot of typos, which I found disappointing for a ~$14 Kindle book.

And the last con: There is only a very brief mention of XDRTB (Extensively Drug Resistant TB), which is the latest major stumbling block in the fight against TB. This book was published in 2012, and XDRTB has been a confirmed problem for many years. I thought it deserved more than a mention in the epilogue, especially since it is a problem that stems from people not completing the prolonged treatments required for the effective management of TB.

Overall, this is a good book if you are interested in the history of tuberculosis. It does not contain a lot of anecdotes from people who have had the disease and is instead largely focused on the evolution of treatment.… (más)