All these names—whether they focus on the destruction of the bodily palace or physical disappearance—reference an important facet of tuberculosis, which is weight loss and wasting caused by lack of appetite and extreme abdominal pain. This is also why TB was widely known as “consumption” until the twentieth century—it seemed to be a disease that consumed the very body, shrinking and shriveling it. Over eight hundred years ago, Daoist priests began referring to the illness as shīzhài, or “corpse disease,” because the illness transforms a living being into a cadaver.
