Up to 1882, the pattern for the control of infectious disease in Austria is set: where multiple cases of a disease such as cholera appear, the local authorities had to turn to provincial (Kreisamt) doctors who declared an emergency. The ill were to be quarantined in their homes, and the authorities had to assure the "necessary isolation, hygiene, and ventilation of the room". Only in exceptional cases could the health commission declare that an individual could be removed from the home by the police.
Tuberculosis was neither reportable nor quarantinable, as it rarely was seen as occurring in the appropriate number of cases (from four to ten) in one place at one time. With Robert Koch's discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus in 1882 came a greater interest in tuberculosis as a social and hygienic problem. But in 1888, when a requirement to report all infectious diseases was introduced in Austria, tuberculosis was excepted. By 1892 a form is prepared by the medical bureaucracy which lists all infectious diseases (such as measles), but not tuberculosis. The rationale is that there is no sense in requiring notification for a disease "unless the sanitary authorities were able to deal effectively with it". Even the simple tabulation of death notifications from the disease was impossible to compile because of a lack of uniform reporting in Austria. But lurking behind this seeming inability is a high degree of awareness of the stigmatizing nature of tuberculosis. Indeed, reading the death statistics for the turn of the century in Austria is complicated by this stigmatization. In 1895, the standard death from lung disease came to be labeled "pneumonia" because of the unpleasant connotations of the label "tuberculosis".
Sander L. Gilman, Kafka: The Jewish Patient
