As a public health field worker assigned to control tuberculosis in New York and Chicago in the 1990s, Paul Draus encountered the horrible effects of tuberculosis resurgence in urban areas, and the intersections of disease, blight, and poverty. Consumed in the City grows out of his experiences and offers a persuasive case for thinking about—and treating—tuberculosis as an inseparable component of the scourges of poverty, homelessness, AIDS, and drug abuse. It is impossible, Draus argues, to treat and eliminate tuberculosis without also treating the social ills that underlie the new epidemic. Paul Draus begins by describing his own on-the-job training as a field worker, then places the resurgence of tuberculosis into historical and sociological perspective. He vividly describes his experiences in hospital rooms, clinics, jails, housing projects, urban streets, and other social settings where tuberculosis is often encountered and treated. Using case studies, he demonstrates how social problems affect the success or failure of actual treatment. Finally, Draus suggests how a reformed public health agenda could help institute the changes required to defeat a deadly new epidemic. At once a personal account and a concrete plan for rethinking the role of public health, Consumed in the City marks a significant intervention in the way we think about the entangled crises of urban dislocation, poverty, and disease.

"Consumed in the City offers a riveting and haunting view of the social havoc wreaked by TB in contemporary America. Drawing from his experience as a public health outreach worker, Paul Draus demonstrates that this preventable and treatable condition will remain a major killer if the ingrained inequalities of inner-city segregation, addiction, and poverty remain unaddressed."—Stefan Timmermans, Associate Professor, Brandeis University, and author of Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR and The Gold Standard: The Challenge of Evidence-Based Medicine and Standardization in Health Care

"Draus's book is a humanitarian tour de force. His depiction of tuberculosis among the homeless in 1990s New York and Chicago moves seamlessly between compassionate portrayals of individuals surviving on the margins and astute indictments of municipal and public health systems that treat symptoms while leaving the major social and structural causes of tuberculosis intact. Draus's ethnographies of the lives and deaths he encountered during ten years of tuberculosis casework provide some of the best insights in recent memory into the injustices of being poor, black, and diseased in urban America. This is a must read for anyone in public health and urban policy, and for those angered by prevailing responses to deepening poverty and inner city blight in America today."—Susan Craddock, Institute for Global Studies, University of Minnesota, and author of City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco

"Draus makes a strong case for bringing ethnography into the practice of medicine to transform patients' histories from narratives shaped by existing medical categories to representations of life as lived by patients.... This is an important book that will be valuable for health care professionals. Recommended."—Choice