The disease that made you in fashion

One of the biggest killers of humankind in history (apart from other humans) has been a tiny organism we now call Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

In ancient Greece, it was considered the most prevalent disease of the age. Throughout history, it has been feared and the symptoms treated with despair. And in the nineteenth century, it was a fashionable way to die.

The most common form of tuberculosis attacks the lungs. Sufferers experience chest pain, fatigue, night sweats, loss of appetite leading to a general wasting away, and a persistent coughing up of phlegm and later blood (and bits of lung tissue). Eventually the patient’s lungs are so invaded by the disease that they suffocate and die. Sounds sexy, right?

No. Not that bit. What our Regency and Victorian poets and artists admired was those features of the disease that fit their ideas about the causes of illness and their concept of beauty.

First, not knowing about germs, they thought that the causes of the illness varied by social class. When the poor died in their filthy overcrowded rooms, they had the Graveyard Cough, the White Plague, the King’s Evil (so called, because the touch of a king was thought to be a cure for the version of the disease we now call scrofula, a tuberculous swelling of the lymph glands). These were diseases of poverty, immorality, and criminality, which were all clearly linked, since poverty was obviously the fault of the poor. (Come to think of it, some modern commentators haven’t moved on from that belief.)

When the wealthy died, it was clearly a different disease, since they were rich, moral, and altogether less smelly. It was consumption, so called because the person grew thinner and thinner. It was, so medical theory had it, an excess of emotion and genius typical of the artistic mind that slowly consumed the patient. They were killed by fiery passion.

And look how lovely they were while they died! Was it fashionable to be slender (rather than hearty and robust like the working classes)? Not being able to eat made you thin. Was it fashionable to be pale (rather than tanned like those horrid workers who must toil in the sun)? Loss of blood will make you positively pasty.

Since one in four deaths in the nineteenth century was caused by the disease, many fashionable poets, musicians, painters and authors died of consumption, which confirmed, in the minds of the fashionable, that their creativity had killed them. Add to that the predilection of said creative types to glorify death by consumption in their poems, operas, and novels, and hey presto. A horrible slow wasting death becomes desirable.

Kirana, Jules’s mistress, is slowly dying of consumption in my current work-in-progress, Unkept Promises. Her death will be written some time in the next few days, poor soul. 

4 thoughts on “The disease that made you in fashion

  1. Egad, when looking like a corpse becomes fashionable, you know you’ve hit rock bottom :-). Seriously, though, I can see how the Romantics especially would see beauty in the disease though it sounds a little morbid to us today. Interesting how so many attitudes toward death and dying have changed in 200 years.

    Tam May
    https://www.tammayauthor.com

  2. its earlier name was The Phthisis. I used it to kill off a former mistress of the hero in one of my Brandon Scandals books, nursed by the woman he fell in love with, all in hiding in Paris when Bonaparte returned in 1815. Wept buckets as I always do when I kill of characters who are not villains. An awful disease, and filled with misconceptions up to fairly recently; it was believed for a long time to run in families, presumably because the close proximity to a sufferer would make it more likely for their vulnerable offspring to catch it.

    • Yes, handy in that way for storytellers two centuries later.

      Phthisis: Collins Dictionary says “via Latin from Greek: a wasting away, from phthinein to waste away”

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