Description

Stalking the Great Killer is the story of Arkansass struggle to control tuberculosis and how the state became a model in its treatment of the disease

To place the story of tuberculosis in Arkansas in historical perspective the authors trace the origins of the disease Arkansas suffered some of the worst ravages of the disease and the authors argue that many of the improvements in the states medical infrastructure grew out of the desperate need to control it

In the early twentieth century Arkansas established a sanatorium and thirty years later the segregated Black sanitorium These institutions helped slow the disease but at a cost removed from families and communities patients suffered from the isolation Joseph Bates saw this when he delivered an uncle to the sanitorium in the 1940s In the 1960s Bates now a physician and his colleague Paul Reagan overcame a resistant medicalpolitical system to develop a new approach to treating the disease

In the age of Covid19 this history offers valuable lessons about community involvement in public health the potential efficacy of publicprivate partnerships and the importance of leadership in the battle to eradicate disease