Tuberculosis Research and Vaccine Anxiety in L. T. Meade's <i>The Medicine Lady</i>

Abstract This article examines how L. T. Meade’s novel The Medicine Lady (1892) responded to a pivotal event in the history of medicine and shaped popular perceptions of the nineteenth-century tuberculosis epidemic before new treatments and public health measures could change its course. The novel centers on a secret discovery of a treatment for tuberculosis, and its temporal setting anticipates Robert Koch’s germ theory and his problematic use of tuberculin, a failed remedy for tuberculosis. Meade explores the ethical questions related to the tuberculin scandal, along with contemporary concerns about women physicians and smallpox vaccination, through a woman protagonist who secretly uses her late husband’s vaccine to treat patients. The narrative interrogates medical authority through a blend of genres that include the social problem novel, romance, and sensation fiction. The late Victorian novel’s conflicts anticipate public anxieties about contagion and vaccination that impact our lives in the twenty-first century.