And for readers who like to close a book with a take-home lesson, one could do worse than to remember what to do and what not to do with muddy boots. THE CURSE OF CONSUMPTION MARION FAY I was six years old when I met Tommy Wallace. He spent a good bit of time with his Aunt Rushie, who lived two doors down from us, while his mother spent a year at the Booneville Sanatorium with tuberculosis. We still see an occasional patient with tuberculosis nowadays, but the sanatoriums are all closed or used for other purposes. However, it still causes 1.5 million deaths worldwide each year, trailing only respiratory diseases, AIDS, and diarrheal diseases as the leading infectious killers. Tuberculosis, known back then as consumption, was widespread in the nineteenth century, causing one out of four deaths in England in 1815. It only began to subside between 1850 and 1950, when deaths due to tuberculosis decreased tenfold, from 500 per 100,000 population in 1850 to 50 per 100,000 population in 1950. Improvements in public health reduced the incidence of tuberculosis even before the advent of antibiotics in 1946 with the introduction of streptomycin. Poor living conditions and the development of resistance to antibiotics have contributed to its resurgence and worldwide threat. Before the discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882, the common understanding of consumption was that it was a constitutional disorder with a strong hereditary element, giving a pale, even "haunted" look to the sufferer. As such, it played a prominent role in literature and the other arts. John Keats, Frederic Chopin, and Franz Kafka died of consumption, as did Edgar Allen Poe's wife, Virginia. Among the familiar victims in our collective consciousness are Mimi in Puccini's _La Boheme_, Violetta in Verdi's _La Traviata_, and Camille, played by Greta Garbo in the MGM film of 1936. Doc Holliday died of tuberculosis in 1887, and his bloody cough figured prominently in the 1993 film _Tombstone_. Consumption claimed a number of characters in Dickens's novels: Little Nell in _The Old Curiosity Shop_, Nell's friend Kit, Nicholas Nickleby's faithful companion Smike, and both Richard Carstone and the boy Jo in _Bleak House_. Thomas Mann's _The Magic Mountain_ portrays a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. Other victims include Ralph Touchett in Henry James's _A Portrait of a Lady_; Edmund Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's _Long Day's Journey into Night_; Fantin in Hugo's _Les Miserables_; Dostoevsky's Katerina Ivanovna in _Crime and Punishment_ and Kirillov in _The Possessed_; and Jane Eyre's best friend in Charlotte Bronte's novel.