Book Review: The Plague and I

Title: The Plague and I

Author: Betty Bard MacDonald

Date: 1948

Publisher: Lippincott

ISBN: none

Length: 254 pages

Quote: “Getting tuberculosis in the middle of your life is like starting downtown to do a lot of urgent errands and being hit by a bus...By background and disposition some people are better suited to being hit by a bus than others.”

Passing quickly over observations about the kind of people who, by driving habits, seem ideally suited to being hit by a bus, past reviewers moved on to observe that the humorist who wrote as Betty MacDonald was uniquely suited to write about the sanitarium experience as it used to be.

Tuberculosis had yet to be brought almost under control by antibiotics. Many, sometimes most, people in a “White Plague”-ridden community were immune carriers who continued infecting others for years before becoming ill themselves. People whose resistance had dropped to the point where they felt ill, coughed, and showed “shadows on the lungs” in X-rays, would normally just die, but occasionally their immune systems won them a few more years. As MacDonald was told:

“To date no medicine has been discovered which will kill this bacillus and not be too toxic for the patient...The only way a patient can get rid of the bacillus is to wall it off in the lungs. This walling-off process is done by fibrosis which...can be torn by the slightest activity...Rest is the answer. just rest, rest and more rest.”

So the treatment plan minimized all activity, including reading, writing, and bathing. Although the patients were mentally sound, the sanitarium's policy was to treat them as much like infants as possible, presumably to promote “rest.” Readers are likely to think “I would have died of sheer boredom”...but MacDonald lived to tell the tale, and make it a funny one, too, as readers of The Egg and I and Anybody Can Do Anything expected.

For those who haven't had the pleasure of those two books, the young Betty Bard's original career plan had been to marry a chicken farmer whose name was MacDonald. Whatever else went on during the early 1920s, she did not enjoy chicken farming, so Anybody Can Do Anything begins with the writer packing up her bags, and her two daughters, and going back to her parents' home, where she worked at dozens of short-term pink-collar jobs before getting into one of the Roosevelt era's make-work programs. The writer, who always wrote as MacDonald because she'd reclaimed Bard as her name in real life, quite liked being a bit of federal bloat. But a co-worker coughed tuberculosis bacilli into the office air...which brings us to the beginning of this book.

MacDonald's not terribly “literary,” but effective, way of introducing everyone in a first chapter recounting pertinent memories from her childhood puts the beginning of this story in chapter two, when MacDonald “began having a series of heavy colds” and “vague pleurisy pains in my back” and “getting up in the morning feeling dead tired.” A chest X-ray showed the dreaded shadow. She didn't think she could afford a sanitarium but, “because you have children” she was told, she was admitted to one anyway. And, despite her doubts about the treatment that seemed likely “to make dying seem like a lot of fun,” she recovered even faster and more completely than the doctors expected.

Question: Did she really have tuberculosis? Answer: If she hadn't had it when she went in—blood tests were done, but who knows—she would certainly have had it while she was there.

Next question: Is a story about people fighting a deadly disease with primitive treatment methods worth keeping “alive” as a book? Answer: Not only is it worth preserving as history; MacDonald made it a positively enjoyable read.

Most of the story takes place in a hospital, with a fairly high level of attention to body functions, but only the kind MacDonald's generation normally talked about—sometimes to the exclusion of more pleasant topics, and sometimes at meals. MacDonald didn't want to grow into that kind of grandparent, for which I'm sure her grandchildren were grateful, and she also gives due attention to philosophy, movies, literature, Positive Thinking, etiquette, race relations, art, crafts, the Pacific Coast, and misbeliefs about tuberculosis.

One thing some readers might not like is the way MacDonald gives all credit for her recovery to the doctors whose real names aren't mentioned in the text. She identifies as Presbyterian in the text. Some Presbyterians have been accused of confusing reverence with reticence; in any case, MacDonald's description of an effort to think “cheerful thoughts” does not mention prayer. If that's the way her experience really was—which I can believe, the Bards being a trendy Progressive family—that's the way she ought to write it; I suspect most Christians' memories of “resting” their way to recovery from tuberculosis would have a lot to say about prayer.

One thing readers might find ironic, in an enjoyable way now that tuberculosis is normally so much easier to cure, is that MacDonald's book would not be recommended for “resting” patients...no matter how valuable its message in favor of cooperating with unlikely-sounding treatment plans might have been, it's just too funny! You will laugh...and for patients like MacDonald and her fictionalized friends in the sanitarium, laughing was as dangerous as coughing. (And it's not even mean or insensitive to laugh. Although we see a lot of people acting stupid, and when sick patients act stupid they often punish themselves aptly, we don't see a lot of people dying. Most of MacDonald's friends recovered too.)

This book has entered the collector price range. Even though MacDonald can no longer use the $2 she'd get if this were a Fair Trade Book, the best price this web site can offer is $15 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment. All four volumes of MacDonald's laugh-out-loud memoirs (Onions in the Stew finds her happily remarried and laughing at 1950s fads with her teenaged children) would fit quite nearly into one $5 package.