Tuberculosis (Third Edition) (1955)

★★★★★ · Contagious aunt dooms another child. · scrounge · 2005-05-01

This is an educational type film about, yep, you guessed it, TB. The main character in the film, Mary (Smith), is shown getting a TB test in school. 2 days later, the results of her test are negative. Soon after, her highly infected aunt comes to live with Mary. She is shown sitting next to Mary on the loveseat, and then procedes to sneeze and cough all over Mary. The film then chronicles briefly the course of Mary's treatment to her new found illness. The narrator describes one of the reasons for spreading TB as being ignorance. The narrotor gives a couple examples, and they show pictures of…

★★★★★ · Still a Scourge in the 50's · JayKay49 · 2012-01-31

Isoniazid wasnt invented yet so what else could ya do but condition people to expedite natural immune function to fight the infection. In the late 40's, my brother had an attack of pleurisy at about age 10 and the doc came over and "drew the pus out of his chest right in his bed." 12 years later he was found to have had disseminated TB through an ophthalologic exam and chest xray...and dodged the service. Who'd a thunk. Never mind that in that same period of time that he had pleurisy, grampa died in a sanitorium of TB. Isoniazid and streptomycin and other drugs that followed have nearly…

★★★★ · Cure TB, Cause Cancer... · MaxHeadspace · 2006-07-09

Filmed in the classic public service style of the 40's, 50's and early 60's. Didn't have much of the cheesy, melodramatic acting common in this kind of film, which is unfortunate because that is always good for chuckles. Interesting to note the casual use of X-Ray machines at that time, even in mobile vans. And so people mistakenly believe that all the lung cancer popping up in the last several decades was due to smoking!

★★★★ · Avoid Coughing Aunts · Dodsworth the Cat · 2022-11-20

Pretty straight-forward educational short, using silent footage and animation, about how TB spreads. Nothing really fancy here. The voice-over is by Bud Collyer (I guess the EB soundtracks weren't done in Chicago any more by 1955).