Must We All Die?: Alaska's Enduring Struggle with Tuberculosis

Alaska Natives have struggled with the 'white plague' of tuberculosis for centuries. At last, physician and historian Robert Fortuine brings their story to light. He provides a comprehensive account of tuberculosis from its earliest occurrence in prehistory through the latest outbreaks, made more threatening by HIV/AIDS. Fortuine describes the courage and self-sacrifice of itinerant nurses who endured challenging and often dangerous conditions, as well as the efforts of doctors who fought cuts in funding as valiantly as they battled for the lives of their patients.

Fortuine chronicles the removal of tuberculosis victims, many of them children, from their families and villages to hospitals in the Lower 48 states. He describes treatments, medical advances, and day-to-day life for the nurses, physicians, missionaries, and teachers who worked to stem the tide that killed and disabled thousands. The struggle against tuberculosis in Alaska is a story of triumph against untold suffering and crippling odds, but it is also a cautionary tale as an increasingly resistant strain of this disease has emerged in the twenty-first century. 

"Must We All Die?" is an encyclopedic contribution to the history of medicine and a tribute to those who fought tuberculosis and to the Alaska Natives who endured a cruel disease that destroyed families and ravaged villages.

Robert Fortuine is a physician who has spend 22 years in Alaska, most of them as either a clinician or a hospital director with the Indian Health Service. In 1989, he joined the faculty of the Biomedical Program at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he teaches clinical medicine to the first-year medical students in the Washington/Alaska/Montana/Idaho (WAMI) program affiliated with the University of Washington Medical School. He has written extensively on the history of medicine in Alaska and the arctic regions. The Alaska Historical Society named him Alaska Historian of the Year in 1990 in recognition of his book Chills and Fever.