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Tuberculosis and Victorian Literature

As difficult as it may be to imagine, a dominant ideal of feminine beauty during the Victorian Era of the nineteenth century involved exhibiting the outward symptoms of tuberculosis (TB), then called “consumption.” Many women who did not suffer from the usually fatal disease worked to mimic its characteristics, using makeup and starvation diets to appear fragile, wan, thin, pale, with flushed cheeks and ruby-red lips. Part of the reason for this fashion was the common belief that TB heightened sexual energy, thus making consumptive women more mysterious and desirable behind their masks of respectability and propriety. “TB was—still is—thought to produce spells of euphoria, increased appetite, exacerbated sexual desire,” Susan Sontag wrote. “Having TB was imagined to be an aphrodisiac, and to confer extraordinary powers of seduction.” Those who actually contracted this “White Plague” may have displayed its emblems of eroticism and beauty naturally, but they paid a heavy price when eventually they would drown in their own blood.

Part of the Victorian legend of tuberculosis was that it supposedly stimulated a mental acuity that increased creative output. This seemed to make sense, inasmuch as so many artists, writers, and musicians of the era (and beyond) suffered from the chronic respiratory infection. In his work The Power of Plagues, Irwin W. Sherman displays “an eminent gallery of victims of tuberculosis” that includes a remarkable sample of the most productive luminaries in the history of literature and art. Many of them, of course, died very young, such as the great poet John Keats at age 21. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe succumbed to tuberculosis before the age of 40, as did all six Brontë siblings (including Emily and Charlotte). Despite the lack of scientific evidence that TB directly affects mental activity, contemporary observers noted that “Tuberculosis patients particularly young talented individuals . . . display enormous intellectual capacity of the creative kind.” Lost in all this were the tremendous suffering and deaths it steadily produced. As one writer put it early in the twentieth century,

"Tuberculosis is a Plague in disguise. Its ravages are insidious, slow. They have never roused people to great sweeping action. The Black Plague of London is ever remembered with horror. It lived one year; it killed fifty thousand. The Plague Consumption kills this year in Europe over a million; and this has been going on not for one year but for centuries. It is the Plague of all plagues—both in age and power—insidious, steady, unceasing."

Abundant evidence reveals that TB has been present in both the Old and New Worlds for millennia, but overcrowding and poverty in American cities made it a major health problem in the United States by the turn of the nineteenth century. Cities like Boston and New York commonly listed the disease as causing a quarter of all deaths in the early 1800s. While latent Mycobacterium tuberculosis is fairly common in human hosts, unsanitary conditions and high-density housing encouraged its transmission and the widespread development of pulmonary tuberculosis, as households with many individuals, packed together against the cold, shared common beds and breathed contaminated air in poorly ventilated buildings. A failure to recognize environmental factors for the high incidence of TB among certain immigrant groups reinforced racial prejudices, particularly against Jews. Even though studies repeatedly showed that Jews were no more prone to TB than non-Jews in the same settings, anti-Semites labeled consumption “a Jewish disease,” an idea that helped justify notions of Anglo-American superiority. Ironically, the same symptoms of tuberculosis the culture romanticized among its elite also became indicative of inferiority in the underclass.