I’m surprised that so many of you did not encounter regular TB testing during your children’s physicals. Maybe because we live in NYC, but every two years the TB test was part of the check-up. And I think it was the case for everyone I knew, not just those who had the same pediatrician.
Unrelated, but I am one who was exposed in my early 20s, was treated for latent TB, and now need a chest X-ray to ensure that I don’t have TB.
as a kid i got a tb test every year. and they gave you a card showing the different outcomes, the card was even embossed with the bumps and which ones to return to the doctor for. it was not a needle it was more like a square thing the nurse pushed down on your arm, it did not hurt and you did not bleed.
I remember getting biennial TB tests in school as a kid. This was in NJ. My kids needed tests before entering school.
My mother is a nurse, and contracted TB circa 1950. It was considered an occupational disease for nurses and doctors. She had to go to a TB sanitarium in Gaylord, CT. (The same one Eugene O’Neill went to. It later became a rehab center.) The “cure” at that time involved weeks of lying flat on your back, then weeks of being allowed to sit up in bed, then weeks of being allowed to sit in a chair next to the bed, and so on. Beds on screened sleeping porches, where snow might drift in in the winter. Drinking something like 6-8 glasses of milk a day. Eventually, doing long walks every day, ending with what was called Hemorrhage Hill. If you hemorrhaged, back to the beginning with weeks of lying flat in bed. The object of all this was (apparently) to collapse the diseased portion of the lung and calcify it. She was there for 9 months. Some people went through multiple cycles.
My great-grandfather on that side died of TB in Ireland. Remember the father in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn dies of it? People used to die of it in droves. Consumption was no joke, despite having been taken up by authors as sort of the “movie disease” of the 19th century.
I remember being TB tested as a child. I think it was routine then.
^^Wow.