Tuberculosis was commonly called "consumption" for many years. When did "tuberculosis" or "TB" overtake "consumption" as the common term, in English, for the disease?
This Ngram isn't much use; it compares the use of the terms "consumption" and "tuberculosis" in American English from 1800 to 2000. Of course the problem is that "consumption" means many other things. The Ngram does show "tuberculosis" peaking between 1900 and 1920, but what I am interested in is roughly when a typical English speaker might have shifted from referring to the disease as "consumption," to "tuberculosis."
The dictionaries to which I have access simply state that "consumption" is an archaic term for the disease.
Best Answer
Expanding on Janus's excellent suggestion (make the search string more context-specific), the "switchover point is much clearer if you graph deaths from consumption/tuberculosis...
So we can reasonably say tuberculosis was already gaining currency before WW1, but by the end of the war it had almost completely displaced consumption. Perhaps because when a major protracted war ends, people want to make a fresh start in terms of language as well as politics and society.
My guess is that the actual cause of the disease (infection by tubercle bacillus) wasn't generally recognised until the turn of the century. The "germ theory" of disease is much associated with Louis Pasteur, 1822 - 1895, but as it says in that link...