History of tuberculosis

Nowhere in these ancient communities of the Eurasian land mass, where it
is so common and feared, is there a record of its beginning. Throughout
history, it had always been there, a familiar evil, yet forever changing,
formless, unknowable. Where other epidemics might last weeks or months,
where even the bubonic plague would be marked forever afterwards by the
year it reigned, the epidemics of tuberculosis would last whole centuries
and even multiples of centuries. Tuberculosis rose slowly, silently, seeping
into homes of millions, like an ageless miasma. And once arrived, it never
went away again. Year after year, century after century, it tightened its
relentless hold, worsening whenever war or famine reduced the peoples'
resistance, infecting virtually everybody, inexplicably sparing some while
destroying others, bringing the young down onto their sickbeds, where the
flesh slowly fell from their bones and they were consumed in the years-
long fever, their minds brilliantly alert until, in apocalyptic numbers, they
died, like the fallen leaves of a dreadful and premature autumn