Tuberculosis has been around for a long time. Even ancient Egyptians and Greeks caught it! Way back then, the Greeks had ideas about what caused the disease. They thought, Maybe diseases are spread by tiny particles. Maybe these particles are alive. But did these “little animals” really exist? The Greeks had no way to prove it.

During the Industrial Revolution, cities crawled with tuberculosis. It got the nickname “the white plague.” That was because infected people turned so pale. People didn’t really know what tuberculosis was. For a long time, they just called it “consumption.” And the idea to cure it with fresh air? It sounds wholesome. But it just didn’t work. 

By the 1830s, people had good compound microscopes. They used them to look at microbes. Thirty years later, French biologist Louis Pasteur studied a disease that was killing silkworms. He caught the silk-killers red handed. The disease came from microbes! Later, he tracked down bacteria that caused human illnesses. He came up with germ theory: Microscopic living things invade the body, and this is where many diseases come from. 

Now we know that human beings are covered in bacteria. Some of these living microbes are good. Some are bad. But back then, some French doctors argued with Mr. Pasteur. He said, “I shall force them to see; they will have to see!”

And people did see. But it didn’t happen all at once. People discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, in 1928. (Antibiotic means “against life.” Antibiotic medicines fight the microscopic “little animals.”) At first, penicillin was used mainly for soldiers in World War II. It became widely available when the war ended. But even that didn’t help people with tuberculosis. Penicillin couldn’t kill the tuberculosis microbe. 

And then Russian scientist Selman Waksman came to the rescue. He discovered another medicine. It was made from mold living in soil. The white plague had finally met its match: the antibiotic streptomycin.