"A health resort for consumptives": tuberculosis and immigration to New Zealand, 1880-1914.

The death rate from pulmonary tuberculosis, "consumption" or "phthisis", at this time was lower in New Zealand than in Britain, at 8 per 10,000 population compared to 13 per 10,000 in Britain.3 While the death rate in New Zealand as in Britain was declining, around the turn of the century there were still more deaths from phthisis in New Zealand than from any other cause.4 The control of the disease was a priority of the new Department of Public Health set up in 1900.5 This article will discuss the encouragement of "therapeutic migration" of tuberculosis sufferers from Britain to New Zealand in the late nineteenth century and the medical beliefs on which this trend was based.6 It will be argued that New Zealand saw itself in