[PANDEMICS] Report of Case of Pulmonary Tuberculosis. (Melbourne, October 1915).

[Melbourne : Government printer, 1915]. Proforma document, 110 x 210 mm, headed ‘Report of Case of Pulmonary Tuberculosis: To be forwarded by First Post’, with manuscript entries made by Dr. P. B. Bennie, Collins Street, dated 6 October 1915, reporting a case of tuberculosis in a patient named Paul Fielder, aged 45 years, residing at 7 Bellevue Street Richmond, an unemployed barman who had previously worked at the Melbourne Hotel, Bourke Street, who is exhibiting Stage 2 symptoms; verso with printed address panel ‘The Town Clerk [OR] Shire Secretary, Richmond [in ms.]’; the completed form was folded and mailed by the doctor to the Richmond Council, where it was endorsed ‘Entered 7-10-15’; a very good, clean example.

‘At the beginning of the 20th century, TB was a major cause of death in Australia – ranking first among females and second among males.’ (NHMRC)

It is worthy of note that even at the height of the Spanish flu pandemic in Melbourne in 1919, the mortality rate from pulmonary tuberculosis – which had long been one of the leading causes of death in Australia and New Zealand (see above) – was still a very significant figure, even when compared to the huge number of influenza victims. Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it tends to be an overlooked fact in First World countries that tuberculosis has been, and continues to be, a far more devastating infectious disease in Third World countries than the coronavirus: in 2019 alone (according to the World Health Organization) 1.5 million people died from TB worldwide, out of the 10 million people who contracted the disease. This makes it approximately five times as deadly as COVID-19 – in the Third World.