Before the advent of antibiotics, TB was a common hazard of the sport of boxing. Many of the men in the sport came from the crowded poor tenement areas of Northeastern cities, where the disease was rampant. The extreme physical demands of the sport made the body ripe for infection. In the ring, germs passed between fighters with bodily fluids. According to boxing historian Coleen Aycock, who visited the Saranac Laboratory Museum in 2014, all of these factors combined to make TB a very common cause of death for the athletes in the sport. We know of a few boxers who came to Saranac Lake with TB. There were probably many more.
Howard Riley wrote an article about Jack Dempsey's visit for the Enterprise on June 14, 2014.
Below is a list in progress of some of the boxers that came to Saranac Lake with TB, or came to visit.
