Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the most deadly of infectious diseases. It has been given many names. The ancient Greeks called it phthisis, which meant to waste away. The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates (460–370 BCE), described it as a weakness of the lung with fever and cough almost always leading to death. Consumption was another term for TB. It indicated that the individual was consumed from within as the flesh rotted away. In the eighteenth century it was thought that there was a build-up of putrid blood in the lungs which caused the corrosion of other organs by ulcerous pus, leading to emaciation of the body. Although in no way accurate, this imagery correctly conveys a process of decay leading to death. In the nineteenth century the disease was given more descriptive names: the robber of youth, the graveyard cough, the white plague or the white death. These reflect the symptoms of the disease, particularly the paleness of the skin in the final stages of the illness. The wasting away and the change in skin colour were captured in a line from John Keats’ poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies’. Keats died from TB shortly after writing it; he was only 25. The modern term tuberculosis was introduced in the mid-nineteenth century [1, 2].