Public Health is Weird: When Tuberculosis Was Blamed on Vampires

Once upon a time, people blamed tuberculosis on vampires.

Seriously.

In this Public Health Is Weird episode, we head to 1892 Rhode Island, where the deaths of several members of one family led to an exhumation, a suspected vampire, and a truly horrifying attempt at a cure. The real culprit was tuberculosis. 

We explore the strange connection between TB and vampire folklore, the discovery and treatment of tuberculosis, a messy Nobel Prize controversy, and a bigger question: Why do humans reach for supernatural explanations when something frightening happens that we can't explain? 

Vampires, tuberculosis, human psychology, and somehow, Dr. Eeks' great grandfather and groundhog grease.

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Sources used in the podcast are listed below and in my blog here. 

Food for the Dead, by Michael Bell

Mysterious, medieval child vampire, The Independent

Consumptive Chic, by Carolyn Day

Smithsonian Magazine, Kat Eschner, March, 2017

CDC MMWR, 1982

Streptomycin, American Chemical Society, 2014

World's Top Infectious Killer, Science Alert, 2025

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Causes or Cures Podcast, your gateway to understanding health and groundbreaking medical research in a fun and easy to understand way. With Dr. Eats as your host, join us as we sit down with the world's leading doctors and scientists to unravel the mysteries of health. From practical tips on well-being to the latest breakthroughs in medical research, we cover it all. Don't forget to subscribe. Now, let's ignite our curiosity and together dive into today's episode.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Eeks, and welcome to this Public Health is Weird tale for causes or cures. Picture a sleepy 1890s New England farming village. Dirt roads, clapboard houses, and fields that roll into dark woodlots. That's Exeter, Rhode Island, population less than a thousand in 1892. In one of those farmhouses lives the Brown family, and tragedy has pinned them down. Mercy Brown, just 19, has died of a relentless wasting illness. Years earlier, her mother, Mary Eliza, and sister, Mary Olive, had fated the same way. Now Mercy's brother Edwin, home after searching elsewhere for relief, is coughing himself thin. Grief breeds rumor. Friends and neighbors insist a dead family member must be undead, siphoning Edwin's life at night. Desperate Father George Brown agrees to an exhumation. On a cold March morning, townsfolk and a local doctor open three graves. Mary Eliza and Mary Olive lie in expected decay, ruled out as culprits. Mercy's coffin, most likely stored all winter in an above-ground crypt cold as a meatlocker, reveals a body almost untouched by time. The doctor finds liquid, bright red blood in her heart, and to onlookers, that is proof. She is the undead tormenting poor Edwin. Folklore prescribes a grisly cure. Mercy's heart and liver are removed, burned to ash, mixed with water, and given to Edwin to drink. The potion is meant to sever the undead bond. He drinks it, all, but dies two months later. Mercy is reburied at Exeter's Baptist Church, and the legend of the Exeter vampire begins its long journey through newspapers and campfire retellings, and now a podcast. Also, a quick shout out here to folklorist Michael Bell, whose book Food for the Dead documents this fascinating history of the New England vampire panic. Now put yourself in the brown shoes. Someone you love, a parent, a sibling, maybe your own kid, dies from a mysterious contagious illness. Before the grief even settles, another relative falls sick, then another. And finally, you feel the same fever clawing at your chest. There's no test, no antibiotic, no drug, no tidy scientific answer. Panic rushes in to fill the gap. Neighbors insist it isn't disease at all. It's the dead, newly risen as vampires, draining the living. The remedy? Unearth the bodies, carve out their organs, burn them to ash, mix the ashes with water, and drink the grim tonic yourself. A desperate smoothie meant to break a supernatural spell. Sounds unthinkable, right? Yet versions of this ritual have surfaced all over the world. When knowledge runs out, humans reach for myth, sometimes comforting, often terrifying. Do you want proof that this reflex isn't just old New England legend? A recent independent article by Vishwam Sankarin, sorry if I massacred your name, Vishwam, describes a 17th-century Polish grave dubbed the Vampire Child. Yeah. Archaeologists found a small skeleton with a padlock clamped to its foot, an unusual and symbolic burial practice thought to prevent the individual from rising from the grave. A belief associated with vampire lore. The child's skull was removed from the rest of the body and set aside, while heavy stones weighed down the torso, every detail arranged to keep the child from rising from the dead and clawing back to life to haunt the living. Same fear, different century, different continent. The supernatural steps in wherever understanding steps out. What actually haunted the Brown family? Well, it wasn't vampires, as cool as they are. Nope. It was tuberculosis. Once upon a time, many dead people who were accused of being vampires actually died of tuberculosis, a disease that haunted humanity for centuries. Tuberculosis, or TB, was often called consumption because of the way the disease seemed to consume the body. Symptoms included severe weight loss, chronic coughing, often with blood in the sputum, paleness and debilitating weakness. An afflicted person looked like they were being consumed from the inside out. And it was sometimes called the white plague because of the extreme paleness of those suffering from advanced TB. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, TB carried a strange, haunting glamour. It drifted through novels and theater like a pale muse. And those who suffered were often cast as fragile, luminous figures, beautiful precisely because they were fading. As Carolyn Day writes in Consumptive Chick, the era even turned tuberculosis into an aesthetic ideal. Yeah. Pallor, delicacy, and wasting became the hallmarks of a tragic, otherworldly beauty. Kind of messed up, right? A famous victim of TB that you guys might recognize is George Orwell, the man who wrote the dystopian novels Animal Farm and 1984, novels that get quoted from more than any other dystopian novel, right? Anyways, he was dying with TB while he wrote 1984, and he died from the disease less than a year after it was published, at the young age of 46. The cruel symmetry is hard to miss there. As the disease consumed his body, he was busy warning us about systems that might one day consume our lives. Despite consumptive chick and the morbid fascination in plays and literature, TB was not glamorous. It was highly contagious and killed millions. At its peak in the 19th century, it caused nearly 25% of all deaths in Europe. But there was hope. There was hope. Things started to change in 1882 when Dr. Robert Koch, and he's German, so it's not Koch, it's like some German way to pronounce it, but I don't know how to say it in German, so it's Koch, okay? He discovered the causal agent for tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This was a landmark moment as it established for the first time that TB was caused by a specific bacterium rather than bad air or the undead crawling out of their graves to eat the living. Suddenly, the artistic melancholy surrounding TB started to morph into scientific understanding. While a cause was identified, treatment didn't exist yet. People were isolated in sanatoriums where they would be exposed to fresh air, rest, and nutritious foods. My great aunt was diagnosed with TB at age 13 and was put in a sanatorium. Apparently, her father, my great-great-grandfather, snuck in groundhog grease because he thought it would cure her TB, but the authorities at the sanatorium kicked him out. According to some of my family members, he thought groundhog grease was a cure for just about everything. And honestly, I don't know enough about the evidence base for groundhog grease to say one way or the other. Things changed dramatically in 1943 with the discovery of Streptomycin, the first antibiotic that actually worked against TB. It cracked open the fight against the disease. And once combination drug therapy arrived in the 1950s, TB became curable for the first time in human history. Okay, and now I'm just gonna nerd out here with a little story. Streptomycin itself came from humble soil bacteria, isolated by Albert Schatz, a 23-year-old grad student working in Selman Waxman's lab at Rudger's. The drug went on to save countless lives and turn antibiotic research into rock star science. But behind the Petri dishes, the story got messy fast. Waxman convinced Schatz to sign away his royalty rights to a nonprofit foundation, which, surprise, was quietly paying Walksman. Schatz also believed Walksman was taking too much credit for the discovery, and he may, you know, he probably wasn't wrong there. Schatz sued, won a tiny slice of the royalties and official recognition, and then poof! Never landed another major research position. Waxman? Well, he walked away with the 1952 Nobel Prize. Turns out, guys, even in microbiology, nerds can play dirty. Right? Revenge of the nerds? Serious, serious stuff. And still, the story isn't over. Outside the comfort of wealthier nations, tuberculosis remains a top infectious killer. It still claims many lives around the globe, proving that while the vampire myth has faded, the monster itself has not. So why do we reach for ghosts, gods, or vampires when reality refuses to line up? Probably because humans aren't particularly comfortable with uncertainty, maybe you noticed. When something frightening happens and we don't understand why, an explanation, even the wrong explanation, can give us a sense of control. If an undead relative is making someone sick, at least there's something you can do. Dig up the grave, burn the heart, break the spell. Don't do that, I was just making a point. And, for the record, there is actually psychological research showing that when people feel a lack of control, we're more likely to perceive patterns and connections that aren't really there. And I will link to some of that research in the show notes if you're interested. If you are a nerd like me, you can dive in. Of course, spiritual and supernatural explanations can sometimes lead us away from effective medical care, like if an illness is understood entirely as a curse, possession, divine punishment, or something only God can fix, or it is what it is. Uh, someone may delay or avoid treatment, right? But I think public health and medicine can make the opposite mistake too. We can become so focused on what can be measured, tested, and observed that we dismiss anything outside the physical realm as irrelevant or irrational. But for a lot of people, spirituality is neither. It can shape how they understand suffering, illness, death, and healing, like it's important to them. And that sure does raise an interesting question. What do you do when the person sitting in front of you believes the spiritual realm is an important part of what they're experiencing? But you don't share that belief. Maybe you don't believe in the spiritual world at all. I don't know. You can't measure the spiritual world, you can't put it under a microscope or order a blood test for it, but you also can't necessarily prove that something beyond the physical doesn't exist. It's trans physical, outside what our usual scientific tools are designed to measure. Like you can't understand it through science. So, how should medicine and public health approach something that may be deeply significant to a person's experience, but exist outside the boundaries of what science can actually evaluate? I don't know, I do not know, but I think it's a question worth asking or thinking about. The Brown family needed an explanation for what was happening to them. They found one in Vampires. Science eventually gave us a physical explanation, tuberculosis, and thankfully, it came with a better treatment than drinking the ashes of your dead sister. Alright, and now it's time for the closing quote. This is from Lewis Carroll. And if you don't know who that is, shame on you. I'm just kidding, but you should know who that is. Alice in Wonderland. Alright. And as to being in a fright, allow me to remark that ghosts have just as good a right in every way to fear the light as men to fear the dark. I love that. Alright, thanks for tuning in. I hope you subscribe to the podcast or the newsletter. Check out some of the other public health is weird shorts on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, wherever. Social media land. I try to join all the places. Alright, that's it for now. Have a great day wherever you are, and goodbye. For now. For now. I was gonna say that like a vampire, but I won't do that to you. Goodbye.