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Syndrome K: The Benevolence Of Misinformation
Fear is a really good motivator for keeping Nazis out of hospitals.
Koch Syndrome is no laughing matter — at least not if you’re German. In English, we call it Tuberculosis and it’s undergone a sort of historical whitewashing thanks to classic novels set in quaint countryside parishes. It’s most famous for being responsible for specks of blood coughed into a hanky by a tertiary character and/or the protagonist’s doomed love interest/youngest child.
This is a visual synecdoche carefully omitting the collapsed lungs, infected organs, septic shock and death. It’s far harder to frame that in a romantic poem and so we’ve become somewhat immune to the horrors of TB over the years. That and the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine was routinely administered to British children from 1953 to 2005.
A decade earlier, across war-torn Europe, fear of this highly communicable disease was much more rampant.
A fear used very effectively against the Third Reich.
Roman Jews had historically lived in the Ghetto Ebraico di Roma (established in 1555) at the request of Pope Paul IV; this was done to ostensibly maintain catholic purity. The ghetto was located on the river, prone to flooding, enclosed by high walls and had only one gate. This…
