Tuberculosis in history and art

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Main article: Tuberculosis

Through its affecting important historical figures, tuberculosis has influenced particularly European history, and become a theme in art – mostly literature, music, and film.

1 Historical people
2 Portrayals
3 See also
4 Notes

[edit] Historical people

Due to the high prevalence of tuberculosis in the pre-antibiotic era, many historically prominent people developed or died from the condition, often in the prime of their productive period.

Theology:

Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, the Roman Catholic nun and mystic from Poland, is the patron saint of mercy, and the Apostle of the Divine Mercy. She suffered greatly from tuberculosis and succumbed to it on October 5, 1938. She was canonized by the Church on April 30, 2000.^[1]
David Brainerd (born: April 20, 1718, died: October 9, 1747) lived only 29 years. His diary has been published and reflects his reliance upon God's faithfulness amidst his battle with consumption. Brainerd's diary has proven historically very influential, particularly to the modern Christian missionary movement.^[2] He was a close friend of Theologian and Pastor Jonathan Edwards in New England.^[3]
The Catholic Church canonized Saint Therese of the Child Jesus (1873-1897) in 1925, who died of tuberculosis.
Cardinal Richelieu of France died of tuberculosis in 1642.

Music:

The Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736) died of tuberculosis at 26.
Frédéric Chopin (born: March 1, 1810, died: October 17, 1849) died of consumption in 1849 at age 39. Historical records indicate episodes of hemoptysis during performances.
Legendary father of country music, Jimmie Rodgers (1897 - 1933) sang the woes of having tuberculosis in the song T.B. Blues (co-written with Raymond E. Hall). Rodgers ultimately died of the disease days after a New York city recording session.
Luigi Boccherini, Italian cellist and composer, died in 1805 of pulmonary tuberculosis.
Tom Jones, the Welsh singing legend, spent about a year recovering from TB in his parents basement around the age of 12.
Cat Stevens contracted tuberculosis. After several months in the hospital and a year of convalescence, Stevens returned to recording.
Van Morrison's "T.B. Sheets", from the album of the same name, is a 9-minute song to a lover dying of the disease.

Mathematics:

Bernhard Riemann, died on July 20, 1866 at the age of 39 years.
Niels Henrik Abel, died on April 6, 1829 at the age of 26 years.

Literature and poetry:

It is generally accepted that English illustrator and author Aubrey Beardsley (b. 1872) died of tuberculosis in 1898.
English Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) and some of his family were taken by tuberculosis.
The Brontë family of writers, poets and painters was particularly struck by TB, with Anne, Branwell, and Emily all dying of it within 2 years of each other. Charlotte's death in 1855 was stated as due to TB at the time, although there is some controversy over this today.
In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) recounts meeting Ernest Walsh, an Irish poet suffering from TB. "... I looked at him and his marked-for-death look and I thought, you con man conning me with your con."
Neo-romantic Scottish essayist, novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) is thought to have suffered from tuberculosis during much of his life. He spent the winter of 1887–1888 recuperating from a presumed bout of tuberculosis at Dr. E.L. Trudeau's world-renowned Adirondack Cottage Sanatarium in Saranac Lake, New York.
The 20th century French writer, playwright, activist, and existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus also suffered from TB during his life time, although he died in a car accident.
Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), a fiction writer who was made famous from his book "Looking Backward", died from tuberculosis.
Franz Kafka (1883-1924), a German-language novelist who was made famous from his novel (The Metamorphosis), died from tuberculosis.
Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), a Japanese poet famous for revitalizing the haiku, died after a long struggle with tuberculosis.
George Orwell (1903-1950), British author of 1984, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia suffered from the disease in bouts from the early 1930s until his death from the illness.
Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), American author and creator of the "hard boiled" detective novel (notably, Sam Spade in the Maltese Falcon), contracted tuberculosis during WWI.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), author of Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) lost his first wife, Marya Dimitryevna, to consumption.
Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), American author and poet contracted TB in 1988; he recovered, losing 60 pounds.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), lost his first wife, Louisa Hawkins, to tuberculosis in 1906.
Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning died of tuberculosis in 1861.
American author Jessamyn West contracted TB in 1932, and recovered.
The Brazilian poet Manuel Bandeira had TB in 1904. The effects of the disease in his life are expressed in many of his poems. The most famous of them is Pneumotórax.
Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), American author, died of tuberculosis of the brain. His 1929 novel, Look Homeward, Angel, makes several references to the problem of consumption, though Wolfe's condition appeared rather suddenly in 1937.

Military:

Okita Soji (1844-1868), a young and famous captain of the Shinsengumi, was rumored to have discovered his disease when he coughed blood and fainted during the Ikedaya Affair. He died of it in his mid-20's, on July 19th (lunar calendar May 30th), 1868.

Painters:

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), The famous painter who painted (The Scream), lost two members of his family to tuberculosis: his mother and his beloved sister. The loss of his sister was immortalized in the painting "The Sick Child."

Others:

Famous gambler and gunslinger John "Doc" Holliday suffered from tuberculosis until his death in 1887.
Arline Greenbaum, the first wife of famed physicist Richard Feynman died from tuberculosis while he was working on the Manhattan Project.
Juliet Hulme, a girl who helped her friend, Pauline Parker, murder Pauline's mother Honore Parker (Rieper) in Christchurch, New Zealand (see Parker-Hulme Murder) suffered from tuberculosis.
Tulasa Thapa, a kidnapped Nepali girl, died of tuberculosis in 1995.
Celebrated British actress of stage and screen Vivien Leigh (1913-1967) died from complications of tuberculosis.
It has been said that King Tutankhamen, Pharoah of Egypt, had TB, but there is debate as to whether it was the cause of his death.
Simon Bolivar, the man who many South American countries consider their liberator, died in 1830 of TB.

[edit] Portrayals

It has been speculated that the real-life ubiquity of illness and death due to tuberculosis affected the portrayal of these issues in European art and literature as well as history. The pale, "haunted" appearance of tuberculosis sufferers was fashionable at times, and has been seen as an influence on the works of Edgar Allan Poe who lost loved ones to this disease. In recent years, this aesthetic has been revived by the "Goth subculture". In 1680 John Bunyan referred to TB as "the captain of all these men of death".

Opera and theatre:

Mimì, the heroine of Puccini's opera, La bohème suffers from tuberculosis . Violetta Valéry, heroine of Verdi's La Traviata, also dies of the disease (a theme carried over in the modern film adaptation Moulin Rouge!).
The character of Jody in the play Hollywood Arms (by Carrie Hamilton and Carol Burnett) suffers from TB.
The play The Cripple of Inishmaan has themes of TB involving the protagonist and another character.

Novels:

In Dan Simmons' novel The Fall of Hyperion (from the Hyperion Cantos), an artificially recreated John Keats suffers and dies from tuberculosis; several chapters in the book describe his agony and personal thoughts during his final days.
In "Magic the Gathering: The Thran", the entire city of Halcyon is infected with Tuberculosis or "Phthisis", and through that disease that Yawgmoth says he shall cure is how he gains power. The disease infects also the great Genius Glacian.
The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680) by John Bunyan - "Yet the captain of all these men of death that came against him to take him away, was the consumption, for it was that that brought him down to the grave."
Tuberculosis is portrayed at least twice in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, himself a medical doctor. In 'The Final Problem', Dr. Watson gets a message saying that a lady was in 'the final stages of consumption'. In the story 'The Missing Three-Quarter', Godfrey Staunton's young wife dies of 'consumption of the most villained kind'. 'Consumption' was a common name for 'tuberculosis' in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Tuberculosis patients were frequent characters in 19th century Russian literature, examples of which include Katerina Ivanovna from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Kirillov from Dostoevsky's Demons (aka The Possessed), and Ippolit and Marie from Dostoevsky's The Idiot.
In the novel The Constant Gardener by John Le Carré, as well as in the movie adaptation directed by Fernando Meirelles, the plot largely revolves around TB drugs beings tested on unwitting subjects in Africa, and dire predictions about a global pandemic of a drug-resistant form of the disease appear repeatedly.
In Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, the protagonist Esther's boyfriend Buddy Willard suffers from tuberculosis, much to her liking.
Celestine, the heroine of Octave Mirbeau's Diary of a Chambermaid, attempts to contract tuberculosis from her dying lover, Monsieur Georges.
In Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens, Nickleby's faithful companion Smike is beset by tuberculosis.
Extensively, in The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, where a three week visit to a sanitarium turns into a seven year sabbatical and additionally in the novelle "Tristan" which is set in an alpine sanatorium.
In Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut, the protagonist contracts TB later in his lifetime.
In the Swedish novel "Körkarlen" by Selma Lagerlöf, the protagonist David Holm is sick with TB, and so are his younger brother Bernard and his friend Sister Edith.
In the Australian novel Seven Little Australians, Judy becomes consumptive after walking from the Blue Mountains to her home.
In Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin, Beverly Penn is dying of consumption.
In the Henry James novel Portrait of a Lady(and the film based on it, starring Nicole Kidman), Isabel Archer's cousin Ralph is progressively suffering from TB, and finally dies of it.
Richard Yates, (1926-1992), the American writer, suffered from TB shortly after WWII, and wrote about the disease in a number of his short stories, including "No Pain Whatsoever"
"In the Year Of My Indian Prince", by Ella Thorp Ellis, she contracts TB and is in a TB treatment hospital where she meets, and falls in love with a young Indian prince, who also has TB.
In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Frances Nolan's friend dies of TB.
In the "Anne of Green Gables" series by L.M. Montgomery, Anne's friend Ruby Gillis dies of tuberculosis.
In Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Jane's friend Helen Burns dies from TB.
In "Love for Lydia" by H.E.Bates, Lydia, contracts TB and is treated successfully in a sanatorium.
In the 1848 novel Camille: The Lady of the Camellias, by Alexandre Dumas, fils, the heroine Marguerite Gautier dies of tuberculosis.

Nonfiction

Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag compares the metaphorical portrayal of TB to cancer.

Film:

The hospitalized mother in the movie My Neighbor Totoro is thought to be suffering from tuberculosis (her ailment is not specifically named in the film, but tuberculosis is cited in the film's novelization). This is an autobiographical reference to the fact that writer/director Hayao Miyazaki's own mother spent several years of his childhood hospitalized with TB.
In the period picture Camille MGM 1936, consort Greta Garbo (Camille) tragically contracts TB (known then as "consumption") and dies in Robert Taylor's arms.
In the biographical film, A Time for Miracles starring Kate Mulgrew. Saint Mother Elizabeth Bayley Seton dies of TB at the age of 46 after founding the American Sisters of Charity order in Maryland. Seton's husband and one of her five children also died of TB.
Doc Holliday and his bloody cough were portrayed by Victor Mature in the 1946 film My Darling Clementine, by Kirk Douglas in the 1957 film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, by Val Kilmer in the 1993 film Tombstone, and by Dennis Quaid in the 1994 film Wyatt Earp.
In the Swedish Film My Life as a Dog the protagonist Ingemar deals with his mother suffering from TB.
In the film Heavenly Creatures, directed by Peter Jackson, Juliet Hulme had TB, and her fear of being sent away 'for the good of her health' played a large role in determining the subsequent actions of herself and Pauline Parker.
In Finding Neverland, Kate Winslet's character suffers and later dies of TB.
In Moulin Rouge the courtesan Satine, played by Nicole Kidman, contracts TB and dies.
In The Others, the servants of the house died of tuberculosis.
In the anime motion pictureSamurai X Trust and Betrayal a member of the Shinshengumi, Okita Soji, has TB and is evident in the fight between him and the main character Kenshi
In the 2002 film The Twilight Samurai, the leading character Seibei Iguchi's wife dies of consumption at the beginning of the story. At the end, his opponent tells of the death of his own wife and daughter of consumption.

Television:

In the popular manga and anime Bleach, Gotei 13 member Ukitake Jyuushiro suffers from what is referred to as Consumption (An older name for TB), as witnessed in flashbacks fighting his lieutenant and coughing up blood.
In season three of Deadwood (TV series), the fictional character Doc Cochran contracts TB, which interferes with his duties about the camp. When the symptoms of his disease become apparent to other residents of the camp, they colloquially refer to him as a "lunger."
In one episode of the animated series Drawn Together, Princess Clara suffers from "the consumption."
In Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa, Alphonse Heiderich suffers from what seems to be TB, but it is a form of lung cancer brought on by the rudimentary rocket fuel he used.
In the popular manga and anime Naruto, Sound Five member Kaguya Kimimaro suffers to what is believed TB due to his bloody coughing and later dies during his battle between Rock Lee and Gaara.

Graphic art:

The Sick Child (1886) by Edvard Munch, portrait of his sister Sophie, who died of TB at 16.^[4]^[5]
Alice Neel (1900-1984), T.B. Harlem, 1940, American. Oil on canvas. JAMA cover June 8, 2005.

Sculpture:

The Permanent Collection of the American Visionary Art Museum includes a life-size applewood sculpture of a human with a sunken chest depicting TB. It is the only known work by an anonymous patient in an English asylum who died of TB in the 1950s.

Music:

Van Morrison's song "TB Sheets" (from the 1974 album of the same name) is about the narrator nursing a girl, who is dying of tuberculosis. The song is a reworking of the TB theme in American blues music.
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum released a song entitled "Phthisis" from the album Of Natural History

Computer games:

The Vizier in the acclaimed Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is revealed to be suffering from the disease. He calls it by the name "Consumption" and is the primary reason for his desire for the Dagger of Time's power.
The character Tachibana Ukyo from the Samurai Shodown series of games had Tuberculosis, and frequently coughed blood before and after matches.