A couple of things about TB -
it's not caused by a virus, it's cause by a bacterium. That may seem like splitting hairs but it isn't, not least because antibiotics don't work for viruses but there are now antobiotics against TB (of course those didn't exist for our 19th century ancestors!)
Coombs, your ancestor was unlikely to have picked up TB from his wife 6 years before he died. It was much more likely that they both had it from childhood. In many people, a primary infection of TB can die down and be dormant for a long time - even decades - before flaring up again. Some people do die during the primary infection, many never go on to develop the fatal form of the illness, but one important feature of TB is that it's a prolonged, indolent disease -- and that's probably why it's so widespread in the developing world now and in the overcrowded Victorian slums then. The TB bacterium is hugely successful in evolutionary terms - it kills its host very slowly, or not at all, which affords it ample opportunity to be passed on.
Nowadays, most TB sufferers in developed countries have the infection in the lung but it can spread to any part of the body. The bones, urinary system, gut, skin and brain are particularly likely to be affected, as well as the lymph nodes of course. "Pott's disease" was TB of the spine, for example. "Scrofula" described swollen TB lymph nodes int he neck. TB in the gut often came from drinking milk from cows which were infected. TB meningitis tended to affect young children and was often shown on Victorina death certs as "hydrocephalus" - it killed over the space of weeks or months rather than the hours that we associate with deadly meningitis these days.
TB is still a killer for huge parts of the world.
