Kinda good morning Hank, it's Tuesday. 

So in addition to giving us the stethoscope, the Adirondack chair, and the state of New Mexico, tuberculosis a-a little bit maybe gave us World War I? So we all know the causes of World War I from CrashCourse, right? The complicated alliance system in Europe, the growing militarization and expansion of empires, et cetera. But the other day my son came home from school and said, “Dad, did you know that tuberculosis partly caused World War I?” And I was like, “What now?” I was so proud because, of course, making connections between human history and tuberculosis is-is my favorite leisure activity, and it's always a joy to see your children get involved in what you're passionate about. And also, it turns out the story he told me is true.

So World War I began after the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, The Duchess Sophie. Now I know I shouldn't say this about a tragedy that led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, but-but the whole thing was kind of a farce. Like, on the one side you had the wildly incompetent support staff of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And on the other side, you had some wildly incompetent would-be assassins, most of whom were teenagers. Now sometimes you hear the assassination presented as, like, some random child anarchist started World War I, but in fact these child anarchists were working for a much larger network that included, like, leaders in the Serbian Army attempting to liberate Serbia from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So yeah, they were kids but the tradition of older men sending 19-year olds to do war stuff actually predates 1914. And also postdates it.

Right, so when it becomes clear in 1914 that Franz Ferdinand is going to visit Sarajevo, three teenagers from Belgrade travel there in the hopes of assassinating him. These three young men are called Gavrilo Princip, Nedjelko Čabrinović, and Trifun Grabež. And each of them had been given a gun, bombs, and a cyanide pill with instructions to commit suicide the moment the Archduke was dead. And the prospect of an early death was made more palatable to these three young men by the fact that they already faced an early death. As one historian put it, “All three were suffering from tuberculosis, and knew they would not live long. They were therefore willing to give their life for what they believed was a great cause.”

Like, earlier in Europe, TB had been romanticized. It was seen as a beautiful way to die and a disease of civilization and refinement that affected beautiful and intelligent and sensitive people. But then in 1882, Robert Koch conclusively proved that tuberculosis was not caused by being hot or artsy, but instead by a bacterium. And soon TB ceased to be seen as an illness of civilization, and was instead seen as an illness of contamination and filth and poverty. And those living with it were hugely stigmatized by their communities, a-a tradition which, by the way, would continue.

So basically these three teenage would-be assassins knew they were already dying. Once they get to Sarajevo, they meet up with other co-conspirators and a total of six people line the parade route with the idea that one of them surely will succeed in killing the Archduke. What actually happens is that the first two kind of lose their courage and then the third, Čabrinović, throws a bomb but misses the Archduke's car and it blows up in underneath another car. Čabrinović then takes the cyanide pill, which it turns out doesn't have enough cyanide to kill him, and then jumps into a river, which it turns out is only four inches deep. So he survives and is quickly arrested.

The motorcade then shoots off really fast and the other three assassins are like, “Oh there's no way we can get him now, he's going too fast.” And that probably would have been a good time for Franz Ferdinand and Sophie to-to go back to the hotel but instead one of their compatriots said, “What, do you think Sarajevo's full of assassins?” And convince them to keep driving around town. And then their driver, who did not know Sarajevo well and could not yet benefit from GPS, took a wrong turn and then stalled the car while trying to shift it into reverse. I probably don't need to say this, but if y-you're the driver for the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, like one thing you probably should be pretty good at in 1914 i-is driving a stick shift. But right, who should find himself standing right outside this stalled car but Gavrilo Princip. He then shoots the Archduke and Duchess to death and then Princip takes his cyanide pill, which again did not contain enough cyanide, to kill him.

And so all three of the teenagers who traveled from Belgrade to Sarajevo to assassinate the Archduke survived the assassination, were imprisoned, and died within a few years of tuberculosis. If they hadn't known their time was short, would we still have had World War I? Probably, there were just so many forces pushing toward a major conflict, but we might’ve had a different World War I, and I suppose it's possible that we wouldn't have had one at all. I mean that's the thing that fascinates me about history. So much might happen, and then only one set of things does.

So in summary, war sucks and tuberculosis also suck. In fact, between 1914, the start of World War I, and 1945, the end of World War II, more people died from TB than died from both those wars combined.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.