American Experience: The Forgotten Plague DVD

Really great American Experience! Completely enthralled me. I attended Paul Smiths College in the late 1970s, at the time Paul Smiths owned the former Gabriels Sanatorium about 8 miles from Saranac Lake and used it as a 2nd campus. The sanatorium had been run by the Catholic church and I lived in St. Margrets the dorm where nuns had lived that cared for the TB patients at Gabriels. The thing that struck me was it had been barely 20 years that TB had been eradicated when I was going to college. At the time it seemed like ancient history.

This DVD was purchased for my grandchildren. They need to learn, in a responsible way, what our past was like. Tuberculosis in my childhood, the 1950s, was almost an unknown disease. This DVD helps all of us to better understand the eradication, hopefully, of this disease for the future. Science and history existing together, not a bad idea. Thank You PBS!

My only wish was it was longer.

My husband thought I was joking when I said I wanted to watch this program on tuberculosis. My great great uncle was Dr. Edward L. Trudeau, so I had a familial interest in the program. Im buying copies of the program for my family members. Both of us thoroughly enjoyed the program !

A wonderful Documentary, my own grandmother died at only 38 from advanced TB, she had been in two sanitariums in the early stages, She had been exposed by her brothers wife, and they also died from TB. My grandmother died in 1945, my mother was only 20 with three younger brothers, the youngest 13. So many millions have died from this terrible disease in the past and even now newer and stronger strains are developing because patients dont finish all of the meds. Many no doubt boarding planes for all over the world! Now that is ont only sad but infuritating!

Will be showing this to my health classes when we do the communicable disease unit. Great way to show the strides we have made in medicine.

Very good as far as it went but failed to enlarge upon the effect streptomycin had. It saved so many lives and you left the audience thinking that it was a failure. It saved my life and many many more in the sanatorium where I was, even those of the chronically ill.

Younger people may not remember this medical era that I was fortunate enough to enter as a recipient of vaccination. Since this terrible air-borne disease still exists, the PBS documentary does much to illustrate how much we owe to medical science. The only lack is the omission of how it decimated Native American populations; however, that began well before the 19th C.

This is a wonderful example of where as society we began to trust drugs, and man, more than God. What you can see in this movie, if you look and listen closely, is the power of our God Given immune system, if we give the body what it needs. It also helps us to understand that there is something missing,in our diets, that we should be able to give our bodies, for our body to do the job it is designed to do. We are not drug deficient. Drugs can help, and they did, for those people whose immune systems were strengthened. There is more to the story, and it will unfold. To God be the Glory! We continue to, in this day and age, do the same thing and get the same results. Drugs, drugs, and more drugs.