Erotic Susceptibility and Tuberculosis: Literary Images of a Pathology

Abstract

What is striking about tuberculosis as a disease-in contrast to other important disease representations-syphilis, let's say, or leprosy-is that tuberculosis gets remarkably good press from writers of belles lettres-especially in the first two-thirds of the 19th century. Rene and Jean Dubos characterize this literary treatment as perverted sentimentalism, and indeed, considering the nastiness of the disease and its ubiquity, it is hard to imagine at first why permanent diarrhea, ceaseless coughing, spitting up of yellow phlegm then bright red blood, having a grotesquely swollen neck after the lymph nodes have bagged a few of the circulating bacilli, not to mention the night sweats, fever, sleeplessness, opium addiction, emaciation, sunken chest, and clawlike hands-it is hard to imagine how the disease could have been romanticized at all.' Nor was it exactly the privilege of the few to have it. In the 19th century, according to Dubos, one-half of the population of England suffered from it with varying degrees of severity (9). At the beginning of the 20th century, practically all Americans were tuberculin positive, that is, had been exposed at one time or another to the