Vampire's Grasp: The Hidden History of Consumption in New England

The story of New England's vampires begins with a scourge whose tragic trail is visible in cemeteries throughout the region. Incredible as it may seem to contemporary Americans, vampires preyed upon their not-so-distant ancestors. Vampire attacks increased dramatically during the eighteenth century and remained the leading cause of death in New England throughout the nineteenth century. But this unseen killer did not resemble the clever Count Dracula of Bram Stoker's imagination. Indeed, it was so small that it was undetectable. New England's authentic vampires, you see, were pathogenic microbes ("bacteria with fangs," as a nurse once described them). Prior to the twentieth century, a diagnosis of consumption (as pulmonary tuberculosis was called at that time) was a virtual death sentence. As the coronavirus crisis was firmly grabbing the world's attention in 2020, it struck me that if Americans in the early nineteenth century had somehow discerned the benefits of distancing, wearing a mask, and getting vaccinated, they might have stemmed the spread of pulmonary tuberculosis and I could not have written this book. Unfortunately, as I described that era of consumption in my first book on this topic, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires (2001), the science that might have generated an effective strategy for flattening the curve of the consumption epidemic did not exist until after 1882, the year that Robert Koch proved that tuberculosis was a bacterial infection. By that time, most of the tragic events examined in this book had already occurred.