Through its effect on the world's population and major artists in various fields, tuberculosis has appeared in many forms in human culture. The disease was for centuries associated with poetic and artistic qualities in its sufferers, and was known as "the romantic disease". [2] Many artistic figures, including the poet John Keats, the composer Frédéric Chopin and the artist Edvard Munch, either had the disease or were close to others who did.
Tuberculosis has played prominent and recurring roles in diverse fields. These include literature, as in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain , set in a sanatorium; in music, as in Van Morrison's song "T.B. Sheets"; in opera, as in Puccini's La bohème and Verdi's La Traviata ; in art, as in Monet's painting of his first wife Camille on her deathbed; and in film, such as the 1945 The Bells of St. Mary's starring Ingrid Bergman as a nun with tuberculosis. The disease also appears in fields such as anime and manga.
Tuberculosis, known variously as consumption, phthisis, and the great white plague, was long thought to be associated with poetic and artistic qualities in its sufferers, and was also known as "the romantic disease". [2] Major artistic figures such as the poets John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe; the composer Frédéric Chopin; [3] the playwrights Lesya Ukrainka [4] and Anton Chekhov; the novelists Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, [5] the Brontë family, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, W. Somerset Maugham, [6] and Robert Louis Stevenson; [7] and the artists Alice Neel, [8] Jean-Antoine Watteau, Elizabeth Siddal, Marie Bashkirtseff, Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley and Amedeo Modigliani either had the disease or were surrounded by people who did. [1] A widespread belief was that tuberculosis assisted artistic talent, as witness the number of great artists who were affected. Physical mechanisms proposed for this effect included the slight fever and the toxaemia caused by the disease, which allegedly helped them to see life more clearly and to act decisively. In 1680 John Bunyan referred to it as "the captain of all these men of death". [1] [7] [9]
Several major operas have exploited the theme of heroines dying tragically of tuberculosis, including Mimì in Puccini's opera La bohème . [9] Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata features the consumptive Violetta Valéry, based on Marguerite Gautier in Alexandre Dumas, fils's 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias . In Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann , Antonia has tuberculosis and is under the control of a Svengali-like quack doctor who forces her to sing herself to death by conjuring the shade of her dead mother, an opera singer. [9] Numerous stage and film adaptations have been made, usually titled Camille or The Lady of the Camellias in English-language versions, and more loosely, as the 2001 film Moulin Rouge! , where Satine dies of tuberculosis. [10] The real life Paris courtesan Marie Duplessis, the historical Lady of the Camellias, died of the disease at age 23. [9]
A variety of plays have featured the theme of a character dying of tuberculosis. This includes Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night , where the protagonist, Edmund, is diagnosed with tuberculosis at the start of the play; his mental anguish forms a substantial part of the drama. [11]
Chopin and The Nightingale is a dramatic reading with music in six acts by Cecilia and Jens Jorgensen for narrator, two sopranos and piano. It enacts the true-life romance of the composer Frédéric Chopin, who had the disease, and "the Swedish nightingale"—the singer Jenny Lind. [a] [3]
Nineteenth-century Russian literature frequently made use of characters with tuberculosis. Fyodor Dostoevsky used the theme of the consumptive nihilist repeatedly, with Katerina Ivanovna in Crime and Punishment , Kirillov in The Possessed , and both Ippolit and Marie in The Idiot . [12] In French literature, Victor Hugo used the tuberculosis theme repeatedly: the disease is the likely cause of the spinal deformity of the hunchback in his 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris , while Fantine becomes ill and ultimately dies from consumption in his 1862 Les Misérables . [9] The disease appears, too, in English novels of the Victorian era, including Charles Dickens's 1839 Nicholas Nickleby and his 1848 Dombey and Son , Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 North and South , and Mrs. Humphry Ward's 1900 Eleanor . [13] [14] In American literature, Little Eva dies a romanticised death of consumption over several chapters of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin . [15]
When tuberculosis was essentially incurable, many patients stayed in a sanatorium for long periods. Several novels by different authors have been set in Swiss sanatoriums for tuberculosis sufferers, including Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain , [15] A. E. Ellis's The Rack, [16] Liselotte Marshall's Tongue-Tied and Beatrice Harraden's Ships That Pass in the Night. [2] In addition, W. Somerset Maugham's 1938 short story "Sanatorium" was set in the north of Scotland (based on his own experience in a Scottish sanatorium in 1919), [6] Camilo José Cela's Rest Home is inspired by his own stay at a sanatorium in Spain, [17] Andrea Barrett's The Air We Breathe was set in upper New York State, [18] and Linda Grant's The Dark Circle was set in the Kent countryside. [19]
Some more recent novels have tuberculosis as a major plot element. For example, John le Carré's 2001 The Constant Gardener , and its film adaptation, tells the tale of the testing of anti-tuberculosis drugs on unwitting subjects in Africa. [20] In the 1915 novel Anne of the Island , the third in the Anne of Green Gables series, Ruby Gillis, one of Anne's childhood friends, dies of "the galloping consumption". [21] Erich Maria Remarque's 1936 Three Comrades focuses on the heroine's love of life in light of her ultimately futile struggle with tuberculosis. [15]
The disease is not limited to human characters, but can help to achieve grim social realism in a novel. Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle portrays tuberculosis as common among cattle reaching the meat-packing plants of Chicago. Sinclair wrote that "men welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, because it made them fatten more quickly". [22]
Some novels take a medical point of view on the disease, with doctors as major characters, and sometimes an intense use of medical language and procedure. For example, in A. J. Cronin's best-known novel, The Citadel (1937), made into a 1938 film of the same name by King Vidor, the idealistic protagonist, Dr. Andrew Manson, is dedicated to treating Welsh miners suffering from tuberculosis. He later assists a tuberculosis specialist in successfully performing a pneumothorax on a girl who is dying from the disease. [23] Shame is brought to Sheilagh Fielding's Newfoundland family in Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams , as she has tuberculosis even though her father is a doctor. [24]
Among the many nonfiction treatments of tuberculosis, Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag (1979) compares the metaphorical portrayal of the disease to cancer. [15] In his autobiography Angela's Ashes , Frank McCourt portrays the prevalence and impact of consumption during his childhood in Ireland. [25] In The Plague and I the author Betty MacDonald describes her nine months stay at a tuberculosis sanatorium and tuberculosis treatment in the pre-antibiotics era. [26]
Many films have dramatised the effects of tuberculosis. In the 1936 film Camille Greta Garbo portrays Marguerite Gautier, who dies from the disease. [15] In the 1945 film The Bells of St. Mary's , Ingrid Bergman portrays Sister Benedict, a nun who suffers from tuberculosis. [27] Drunken Angel , a 1948 film by Akira Kurosawa, is the story of a doctor (Takashi Shimura) who is obsessed with curing tuberculosis in his patients, including a young yakuza (Toshirō Mifune) whose illness is being used by his organization as a biological weapon. [28] In the first Zatoichi movie (1962), Ichi's opponent Hirate has the disease, making him wish to die fighting Ichi. [29] In the 1993 film Tombstone the character Doc Holliday is referred to as a "lunger", and tuberculosis motivates his actions throughout the film. He dies of consumption near the end. [30] In the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures , directed by Peter Jackson and based on a true story, Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet) had the disease, and her fear of being sent away 'for the good of her health' played a large role in determining subsequent actions. [31] Jane Campion's 2009 film Bright Star describes the romantic relationship of Fanny Brawne and the poet John Keats, ending with Keats's death of the disease, aged 25. [15]
Several major artists have depicted tuberculosis from their personal experience. Rembrandt's wife Saskia seems to have died of the disease aged 29; he drew her both when sick and on her deathbed. [32] Edvard Munch returned to the theme many times in his career, including his paintings The Dead Mother and The Sick Child , of his mother and his sister Sophie, both of whom died of the disease. [33] [34] [32] Claude Monet's Camille Monet sur son lit de mort shows his first wife Camille on her deathbed. [32] Eugeen Van Mieghem's Facing Death depicts his wife Augustine lying sick with the disease. [32] Alice Neel's 1940 painting T.B. Harlem depicts a tuberculosis ward in New York. [8]
The permanent collection of the American Visionary Art Museum contains a life-size applewood sculpture, Recovery, of a tuberculosis sufferer with a sunken chest. It is the only known work by an anonymous patient in an English asylum who died of the disease in the 1950s. [35]
A tuberculosis theme appears in Carl Michael Bellman's 1790 Fredman's Epistles , where the character Movitz catches the disease: Epistle no. 30, dedicated "Till fader Movitz, under dess sjukdom, lungsoten. Elegi" ("To father Movitz, during his illness, consumption. An elegy"), has the lines Movitz, din Lungsot, den drar dig i grafven ("Movitz, your consumption is taking you to the grave"). [36] It appears, too, in American blues music. Jimmie Rodgers (1897–1933), country music singer, sang about the woes of his tuberculosis in the song "T.B. Blues" (co-written with Raymond E. Hall) which he recorded in 1931 at San Antonio, Texas. [15] He also recorded Whippin' That Old T.B. in 1932, but ultimately died of the disease days after a New York City recording session. The tuberculosis theme is reworked in Van Morrison's song "T.B. Sheets", in which the narrator nurses a girl who is dying of tuberculosis. [37]
Tuberculosis also appears in anime and manga. [38] For example, an early manga work by the influential author and illustrator Osamu Tezuka is named Tuberculosis. It tells the tale of a boy and his uncle who shrink to microscopic scale to fight the disease inside a child's body. [39]
Tuberculosis plays a major role in the 2018 western video game Red Dead Redemption 2 . In the game, the protagonist Arthur Morgan contracts the disease after an altercation with a diseased farmer, giving him only a short time to live following his diagnosis. Faced with his own mortality, he becomes more conscious of his actions and tries to better himself in the time he has left, doing his best to give the remaining members of the Van der Linde gang an opportunity at a better life following his death, all the while seeking redemption for his past behaviour. [40] [41]
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian painter. His 1893 work The Scream has become one of Western art's most acclaimed images.
Tuberculosis (TB), also known colloquially as the "white death", or historically as consumption, is an infectious disease usually caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, in which case it is known as latent tuberculosis. Around 10% of latent infections progress to active disease that, if left untreated, kill about half of those affected. Typical symptoms of active TB are chronic cough with blood-containing mucus, fever, night sweats, and weight loss. Infection of other organs can cause a wide range of symptoms.
A sanatorium, also sanitarium or sanitorium, is a historic name for a specialised hospital for the treatment of specific diseases, related ailments, and convalescence. Sanatoriums are often in a healthy climate, usually in the countryside. The idea of healing was an important reason for the historical wave of establishments of sanatoria, especially at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. One sought, for instance, the healing of consumptives especially tuberculosis or alcoholism, but also of more obscure addictions and longings of hysteria, masturbation, fatigue and emotional exhaustion. Facility operators were often charitable associations, such as the Order of St. John and the newly founded social welfare insurance companies.
The Lady of the Camellias, sometimes called Camille in English, is a novel by Alexandre Dumas fils. First published in 1848 and subsequently adapted by Dumas for the stage, the play premiered at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris, France, on February 2, 1852. It was an instant success. Shortly thereafter, Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi set about putting the story to music in the 1853 opera La traviata, with female protagonist Marguerite Gautier renamed Violetta Valéry.
Sokołowsko is a village and traditional climatic health resort in Gmina Mieroszów, within Wałbrzych County, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, in south-western Poland. First information about Goerbersdorff appears in 1357,as an existing village set most likely by Benedicts monastery in Broumov. It lies approximately 4 kilometres (2 mi) north-east of Mieroszów, 12 km (7 mi) south of Wałbrzych, and 75 km (47 mi) south-west of the regional capital Wrocław.
Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness! is a 1912 novel by the Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf. It was translated into English by William Frederick Harvey in 1921. Lagerlöf was commissioned to write it by a Swedish association as a means of public education about tuberculosis ("consumption"). It has been dramatized for the screen twice in Sweden and once in France, under various English titles of The Phantom Carriage, The Phantom Chariot, The Stroke of Midnight, and Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness.
The Sick Child is the title given to a group of six paintings and a number of lithographs, drypoints and etchings completed by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch between 1885 and 1926. All record a moment before the death of his older sister Johanne Sophie (1862–1877) from tuberculosis at 15. Munch returned to this deeply traumatic event repeatedly in his art over a period of more than 40 years. In the works, Sophie is typically shown on her deathbed accompanied by a dark-haired, grieving woman assumed to be her aunt Karen; the studies often show her in a cropped head shot. In all the painted versions Sophie is sitting in a chair, obviously suffering from pain, propped by a large white pillow, looking towards an ominous curtain likely intended as a symbol of death. She is shown with a haunted expression, clutching hands with a grief-stricken older woman who seems to want to comfort her but whose head is bowed as if she cannot bear to look the younger girl in the eye.
City of Hope is a private, non-profit clinical research center, hospital and graduate school located in Duarte, California, United States. The center's main campus resides on 110 acres (45 ha) of land adjacent to the boundaries of Duarte and Irwindale, with a network of clinical practice locations throughout Southern California, satellite offices in Monrovia and Irwindale, and regional fundraising offices throughout the United States.
Madonna Mary Swan-Abdalla was a Lakota woman. Born on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, Madonna Swan prevailed over extreme difficulties including the Native American tuberculosis epidemic of the 20th century to lead a fulfilled life. She overcame the terrible conditions of socio-economic deprivation, restricted education, poor health care, and confinement to the Indian tuberculosis sanatorium and the reservation, to attend college, become a Head Start teacher, marry, raise a child, and be named Native American Woman of the Year. Madonna Swan became an inspiration to both Native and non-Native women.
The history of tuberculosis encompasses the origins of the disease, tuberculosis (TB) through to the vaccines and treatments methods developed to contain and mitigate its impact.
The Indian hospitals were racially segregated hospitals, originally serving as tuberculosis sanatoria but later operating as general hospitals for indigenous peoples in Canada which operated during the 20th century. The hospitals were originally used to isolate Indigenous tuberculosis patients from the general population because of a fear among health officials that "Indian TB" posed a danger to the non-indigenous population. Many of these hospitals were located on Indian reserves, and might also be called reserve hospitals, while others were in nearby towns.
The town of Colorado Springs, Colorado, played an important role in the history of tuberculosis in the era before antituberculosis drugs and vaccines. Tuberculosis management before this era was difficult and often of limited effect. In the 19th century, a movement for tuberculosis treatment in hospital-like facilities called sanatoriums became prominent, especially in Europe and North America. Thus people sought tuberculosis treatment in Colorado Springs because of its dry climate and fresh mountain air. Some people stayed in boarding houses, while others sought the hospital-like facilities of sanatoriums. In the 1880s and 1890s, it is estimated that one-third of the people living in Colorado Springs had tuberculosis. The number of sanatoriums and hospitals increased into the twentieth century. During World War II, medicines were developed that successfully treated tuberculosis and by the late 1940s specialized tuberculosis treatment facilities were no longer needed.
The Story of John M'Neil is Britain's first public health education film, produced in 1911 by Dr Halliday Sutherland. It is a silent film which dramatises a Scottish family living in slum housing and shows how tuberculosis was spread between family members, as well as how it was treated.
Stolta stad! is Epistle No. 33 in the Swedish poet and performer Carl Michael Bellman's 1790 song collection, Fredman's Epistles. One of his best-known works, it combines both spoken and sung sections. In the spoken sections, Bellman, as composer and as performer, imitates a whole crowd of people of many descriptions. It has been described as Swedish literature's most congenial portrait of the country's capital city, Stockholm.
Human uses of living things, including animals, plants, fungi, and microbes, take many forms, both practical, such as the production of food and clothing, and symbolic, as in art, mythology, and religion. Social sciences including archaeology, anthropology and ethnography are starting to take a multispecies view of human interactions with nature, in which living things are not just resources to be exploited, practically or symbolically, but are involved as participants.
Samuel H. Golter was born in Russia but emigrated to the United States in 1906. In 1926, he became superintendent of the Los Angeles Sanatorium, a free treatment center run by the Jewish Consumptive Relief Association in Duarte, California. In 1932, Golter became Executive Director. He led a nationwide campaign to eliminate the institution's large debt, followed by a successful expansion. Under his leadership, the institution transitioned from a small tuberculosis treatment center to a major research, teaching, and treatment center for cancer and other diseases, with a $600,000 annual budget. Long nicknamed "The City of Hope", the expanded institution was officially renamed the City of Hope National Medical Center.
Diseases, both real and fictional, play a significant role in fiction, with certain diseases like Huntington's disease and tuberculosis appearing in many books and films. Pandemic plagues threatening all human life, such as The Andromeda Strain, are among the many fictional diseases described in literature and film.
Charles David Spivak was a Russian-born American medical doctor, community leader, and writer. He was one of the founders of the Jewish Consumptives' Relief Society in what is now Lakewood, Colorado. He was the editor of The Sanatorium as well as the first editor of the Denver Jewish News (now known as the Intermountain Jewish News. With Yehoash, he is also the author of what was once the premier Yiddish-English Dictionary.
Death and the Child is a composition created by Edvard Munch in 1889. Since 1918 it is located in the Kunsthalle Bremen. It depicts a little girl at her mother’s deathbed who is looking at the viewer in a fearful manner. A second, thus far unknown painting of the artist was discovered underneath the canvas in 2005. A new version of that motif, which refers to Munch’s family and the early death of his mother was created between 1897 and 1899 and is now hanging in the Munch Museum in Oslo. An etching was made in 1901 with this motif.
'If you don't cry when Bing Crosby tells Ingrid Bergman she has tuberculosis', Joseph McBride wrote in 1973, 'I never want to meet you, and that's that.'
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Kekkaku (Tuberculosis) This disease also existed in Japan and, while it does not show up much in stories set in a contemporary setting, it does appear in anime and manga set in earlier times... In Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal two historical personages, Okita Soji and Takasugi, have TB ... The eighth story in Lone Wolf and Cub includes Izawa, a samurai suffering from TB.