Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the Scottish tinkerer and chemist James Watt began working on a new project.
He had already achieved fame and success for making steam engines more efficient, helping to fuel the industrial revolution that would radically reshape human history. The steam engine would lead to everything from air-conditioning to air travel to AirPods, while also unleashing over a trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, reshaping the planet's climate. Watt's innovation carried within it so much power that we named a measurement of power after him. Watt also made other important contributions to the human collection of tools and knowledge, inventing a machine that could copy sculptures and developing new strategies for manufacturing chlorine to bleach textiles.
But Watt hoped this new project would be his most important yet. He became obsessed with finding some kind of chemical solution to treat the lung disease known to physicians as phthisis. Watt's daughter Jessy had died of phthisis at the age of fifteen in 1794. And now his son, Gregory, was ill with the disease, suffering from the classic symptoms of a persistent cough, night sweats, fever, and the physical wasting of the body that gave the disease its colloquial name: consumption. Gregory was in his early twenties, a skilled orator known for being phenomenally attractive—one friend described him as "literally the most beautiful youth I ever saw." In a furious attempt to save Gregory, Watt helped invent a device that delivered nitrous oxide to the lungs, believing that shifting the amount of oxygen available to the body might help it heal. But the treatment proved unsuccessful. After many years of suffering, Gregory died of consumption in 1804 at the age of twenty-seven.
By 1900, phthisis had come to be known by a new name: tuberculosis. My great-uncle Stokes Goodrich was born that year in rural Tennessee. He was raised in a wood-frame house built by my great-grandfather Charles, a country doctor who rode his horse night and day around Franklin County delivering babies and dispensing medicine.
Stokes was a sickly child. In those days—and in these ones, too, I suppose—it was common to connect illness to some kind of deficiency, failure, or past mistake. A physician might conclude, as one German doctor did in the early eighteenth century, that a woman’s life-threatening illness was brought on “by a dog which barked loudly at her.” For baby Stokes, being given coffee and sweets by a family friend was thought to be the inciting incident. Thereafter, Stokes “developed the worst case of typhoid fever I ever saw recover,” my great-grandfather later reported in a short memoir he wrote for our family.
In 1918, when Stokes was eighteen, he again nearly died during the Great Influenza pandemic when he became ill while working at a munitions factory. He survived, and in 1920 went to work for Alabama Power and Light, laboring as a lineman. As the 1920s progressed, Stokes experienced frequent bouts of what he hoped might be bronchitis. But the stubborn cough would not go away, and eventually, after coughing up blood, he sought medical attention.
Here is how my great-grandfather reported what happened next: “Stokes went to see a fine doctor in Gadsden, Alabama, who X-rayed him and discovered tuberculosis in the apex of his right lung. The X-ray technician who made the film told me, ‘Dr. Goodrich, your son has miliary tuberculosis, and I have never seen a case that lived over two months.’”