tubercular

In Thomas Mann’s novel “The Magic Mountain,” set a decade or so later, the tubercular Hans Castorp too saw “his own grave” in the X-ray — “the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness.”

He had lost an older brother, Harold, to tuberculosis at age 24, and a younger brother, Arthur, to tubercular encephalitis at age 7, according to the Nixon library.

The year after Willard stepped off his train into paradise, the California Board of Health took the “radical” step of asking the state to stop this surge of TB arrivals: halt trains at the state line, examine passengers, quarantine anyone who looked tubercular and even send them right back where they came from.

All except for Ratso, a tubercular, disabled con man.

In the chapter called “Southern California for Invalids,” Nordhoff writes of running into a tubercular friend at a hotel in L.A., a friend he had last seen two years before, on the East Coast, at death’s door.