Severe but curable disease- 1940s

Some Lonely Scorpio

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I need help with an idea I’m playing with for my current WIP. Specifically, medical information/details. A lot is still up in the air at this point, so I may not even get to utilize this idea. But I want to get this problem figured out if I ever get the chance to. I want to give my MC a disease that’s severe and debilitating but ultimately something he could recover from and return to working. I was considering giving him cancer, but cancer had such a high fatality rate at the time and treatments were so primitive, I wouldn’t want a potential medical inaccuracy.

Some context: My protagonist (with the exception of a leg injury he suffered in the war) is a healthy young man in his early thirties.

I’d appreciate any advice or insight anyone may have on this. :)
 

Maryn

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Give him TB. Many adults of the era had it, especially urban people, and found out only when they became severely ill. I'm no doctor, but I understand it was more managed than cured until the 1950s, so people would spend time recovering (often in sanitariums in the desert southwest, the dry air being considered more healthful), then return to work.

I've been messing with genealogy and have a whole slew of forebears from the 1850s through 1940s who had TB much of their adult lives. Some died of it in their thirties, but others lived and worked physically demanding blue collar jobs into their 60s.
 

MAS

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Polio was a scourge in the 1940s, and left many survivors, although many had serious permanent side effects.
 

Some Lonely Scorpio

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Marissa: Funnily enough, I was originally considering TB! And unless someone else offers a more compelling suggestion, I might still go with it.
 

P.K. Torrens

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The key is that you want them to recover. TB isn’t necessarily severe and debilitating when it leads to full recovery. Usually, the patients who got it really bad ended up dying. The ones who got milder forms (it’s not the disease but your immune response) did well long-term.

You could give him adult-onset chickenpox with a bad complication like encephalitis. Then he recovers (measles could do the same but your MC isn’t the right age for it).

You’ve posed an interesting scenario!
 

Some Lonely Scorpio

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P.K. Torrens: Sorry, I could have worded that a little more clearly. I meant temporarily debilitating; something that would result in a long hospital stay and him being dependent on others for a while, but something he would eventually recover from. Thanks for your informative comments! I hadn't thought about adult-onset chickenpox. I'll take that into consideration. ;)
 

talktidy

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Nephritis? Kidney disease.

Some of it occurs due to an infection, with inflammatory processes accounting for most of the rest.

He could certainly be in hospital for a while and if he was given antibiotics I would expect him to make a quick recovery.
 

Some Lonely Scorpio

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That's a bit dicey. I should clarify that this takes place during World War II, when antibiotics were still relatively new and hadn't yet become commonplace. Still, thanks for your suggestion!
 

lonestarlibrarian

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Just re-re-re-re-read a 1950 Agatha Christie book where a goiter played a significant role in a character's life around WWI. That's where you have an abnormal swelling in the neck from an abnormal thyroid gland. It caused the character to isolate herself from society, due to being self-conscious about how it looked. A GIS will show how disfiguring a bad one can be. Eventually, the character was able to get surgery for it and have it removed, but she had to travel to Switzerland to get that done. Although the character's surgery went well, and all she had to show for it were throat scars, it can be dangerous-- it can affect your voice or breathing if mistakes are made.

Switzerland/Berne continued to be a center for thyroid surgery after Theodor Kocher's modern pioneer work. He eventually won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1909. Additional advancements in surgical technique were made after WWII, and you get improved antithyroid drugs in the mid-60's. But by 1940, goiter was something that was ugly and disfiguring and wasn't well-understood by society--- but it was the sort of thing that could be treated by a specialist and you could go on to live a productive life. And, as you can see from GIS, it can affect anyone, regardless of age, whether you're a child, a teenager, or elderly, or anyone in between.
 
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P.K. Torrens

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Nice one!

Just re-re-re-re-read a 1950 Agatha Christie book where a goiter played a significant role in a character's life around WWI. That's where you have an abnormal swelling in the neck from an abnormal thyroid gland. It caused the character to isolate herself from society, due to being self-conscious about how it looked. A GIS will show how disfiguring a bad one can be. Eventually, the character was able to get surgery for it and have it removed, but she had to travel to Switzerland to get that done. Although the character's surgery went well, and all she had to show for it were throat scars, it can be dangerous-- it can affect your voice or breathing if mistakes are made.

Switzerland/Berne continued to be a center for thyroid surgery after Theodor Kocher's modern pioneer work. He eventually won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1909. Additional advancements in surgical technique were made after WWII, and you get improved antithyroid drugs in the mid-60's. But by 1940, goiter was something that was ugly and disfiguring and wasn't well-understood by society--- but it was the sort of thing that could be treated by a specialist and you could go on to live a productive life. And, as you can see from GIS, it can affect anyone, regardless of age, whether you're a child, a teenager, or elderly, or anyone in between.
 

maryland

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If it's any help, my mother in about 1940, England had TB. They removed one lung and she came back from the sanitorium - in the middle of the war, with German bombs falling on streets nearby. And she lived quite normally, no other illnesses until dying suddenly at 79, going out working and even smoking. (Though cigarettes then were less filled with chemicals than those of today.)
 

Lil

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Subacute bacterial endocarditis. Not all that common, and treatable with antibiotics, but these weren't available until after the war. (I have a relative who died of it in 1939, and her doctor was weeping because she could have been cured if he could have gotten hold of penicillin.)