What had brought him to Lister’s ward was a hacking cough that was accompanied by white discharge tinged with blood, sometimes amounting to as much as one and a half pints. The diagnosis was plain: first-stage phthisis, or pulmonary tuberculosis—a respiratory disease for which there was no cure in the 1850s. Hospital policy dictated that incurables not be admitted, and so Lister sent Chappell back out into the general population. The medical community did not yet know that tuberculosis is a highly infectious disease. The fact that Chappell was forced to sleep in the same room with five or six
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