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Youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies..." The poet who
wrote these words, John Keats, was only twenty-four when he first
coughed up blood. When Keats came home feverish one night,
the friend he was staying with urged him to go to bed at once. No
sooner did he lie down than he gave a hacking cough that brought
with it the unmistakable taste of blood. The candle he lit con-
firmed his expectations: it revealed a bright red spot on his pillow.
"That drop of blood is my death-warrant," Keats said calmly to
his friend; "I mist die." Frightened, his friend ran out into the
cold February night for a doctor in the first of many attempts to
save young Keats over the next year. But all attempts were useless.
Tuberculosis germs could have been hdiing in Keats's lungs since
childhood; by the time the disease revealed itself, leaving its red
signature on his pillow, the battle was already lost.

Keats knew this all too well: as a boy of fourteen, he had cared
for his mother when she lay dying tuberculosis. He allowed no
one else to cook her meals, and sat with her through the night in a

"Cover your mouth when you cough!" admonished a tuberculosis control
brochure distributed in Germany, in the early twentieth century.