Why people thought tuberculosis was hot

Dying from tuberculosis, the disease formerly known as consumption, was a bloody, grizzly way to go. But surprisingly, just a few hundred years ago, the disease was widely considered an ‘ideal’ way to die. There were many myths surrounding the disease. Did consumption make you a creative genius? Did it give you extraordinary powers of seduction? Let’s find out.


See our video on Keats:    • A short biography of John Keats  

Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:38 What is consumption?
5:21 Myth 1 - it caused male creative genius
7:48 Myth 2 - it was super sexy
9:17 Myth 3 - it's caused by romantic love
11:49 Myth 4 - a 'good and easy' death
13:08 Myth 5 - an ideal Christian death
15:09 Literature and cultural consumptive beliefs
19:16 Consumptive myths today
20:24 Conclusion


Written, presented, and edited by Rosie Whitcombe
@books_ncats Twitter & Instagram

Directed, produced, and edited by Matty Phillips
@ma_ps_ Twitter & Instagram
https://mphotos.uk/



Bibliography

Beddoes, Thomas, ‘Essay on Consumption: View of the Subject’, Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Pulmonary
Consumption, For the Use of Parents and Preceptors (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799)

Byron, Lord George Gordon, The Complete Works of Lord Byron (e-artnow, 2019)

Clarke, Imogen, ‘Tuberculosis: A Fashionable Disease?’, Science Museum Blog https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/tub...

Daniel, Thomas M., Bates, Joseph H., Downes, Katharine A., ‘History of Tuberculosis’, Tuberculosis: Pathogenesis, Protection, and Control, ed. by Barry R. Bloom (Washington DC: ASM Press, 1994)

De Almeida, Hermione, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (Oxford: OUP, 1991)

Farley, Paul, and Symmons Roberts, Michael, Deaths of the Poets (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017)

Hammond, Mitchell L., Epidemics and the Modern World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020)

Lawlor, Clark, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (London: Palgrave, 2007)

The Letters of John Keats, ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 2011)

Roe, Nicholas, John Keats: A New Life (Cornwall: Yale University Press, 2013)

Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and its Metaphors (London: Penguin, 2002)

‘Tuberculosis in Europe and North America, 1800-1922’, Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics, Curiosity Collections, Harvard Library https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/con...

Tuberculosis Symptoms, NHS: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/tubercu...

WHO on Tuberculosis: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sh...



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