Medical and Social Influences on Consumptive Identity, 1821–1912

Abstract

Tuberculosis was always more than a death-sentence. From Romantic poetry, to European opera, to Victorian novels, to remote corners of the British Empire and the American frontier, tuberculosis was a source of creativity and inspiration, and a motivation for disabled adventurers seeking a new life in a new world. Yet it also caused more death and severe impairment than any other disease in Victorian England. Some authors suggest tuberculosis accounted for around 80 per cent of disability. To understand this ancient disease’s impact on disabled identity, one must first understand something of its complex interactions with the human body and with human civilisation, especially in nineteenth-century Britain. This was where (and when) modern concepts of disability began to consolidate, and in which the cultural meanings of ‘consumption’ underwent a remarkable transformation.