Thanks to vaccines, tuberculosis is rare in North America today and, thanks to antibiotics, relatively treatable. This wasn't the case in 1938, when Betty MacDonald was diagnosed. It was more common and often deadly. The only hope for a cure was treatment in a sanitorium, which was costly. For those who couldn't afford it, there were public facilities with long wait lists. It was into one of these, Firland Sanitorium (The Pines in The Plague and I), that Betty MacDonald was lucky enough to go in 1938. With the same abundant wry humor and keen observation of people that made her first book, The Egg and I, so immensely popular, MacDonald describes life at The Pines.