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.
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Notes
- 1.
Henry I. Bowditch, ‘Consumption in America’, in From Consumption to Tuberculosis: A Documentary History, ed. by Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), pp. 57–96 (p. 58) (first published in The Atlantic Monthly (January–March 1869)).
- 2.
See John E. Baur, ‘The Health Seeker in the Western Movement, 1830–1900’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review (1959), p. 105; http://jstor.org [accessed 2nd June 2017].
- 3.
James Clark, M.D., A Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption, Comprehending an Inquiry into the Causes, Nature, Prevention and Treatment of Tuberculous and Scrofulous Diseases in General (London: Sherwood Gilbert and Piper, 1835), pp. 8–9. F.B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1988), p. 19, suggests tuberculosis accounted for around 80 per cent of disability.
- 4.
Sections of this chapter have appeared previously in Alexandra Tankard, ‘The Victorian Consumptive in Disability Studies’, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 5 (2011), pp. 17–34. Permission from Dr David Bolt.
- 5.
Figures from F.B. Smith, The People’s Health 1830–1910 (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 288; J. Edward Squire, M.D., The Hygienic Prevention of Consumption (London: Charles Griffin, 1893), p. 2, and S.A.K. Strahan, Marriage and Disease: A Study of Heredity and the More Important Family Degenerations (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892), p. 194.
- 6.
Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress, appendix volume III. Minutes of Evidence (49th to 71st days), being mainly the evidence of the Critics of the Poor Law and Witnesses representing the Poor Law and Charitable Associations (London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationery Office by Wyman and Sons, 1909), p. 35. In a study of prison inmates, Charles Goring, On the Inheritance of the Diathesis of Phthisis and Insanity—A Statistical Study Based upon the Family History of 1500 Criminals, Draper’s Company Research Memoirs: Studies in National Deterioration, 5 (London: Dulau, 1909), p. 4, stated that ‘most probably 10% of the general population at some time in their lives suffer from pulmonary tuberculosis’.
- 7.
Clark, Treatise, pp. 8–9.
- 8.
Gibson, ‘The Cry of the Consumptives’, p. 644.
- 9.
Royal Commission, p. 34.
- 10.
See especially the Sparuls case in the Royal Commission, p. 521, discussed later.
- 11.
Smith, Retreat, pp. 238–239.
- 12.
Clark, Treatise, pp. xiii–xiv.
- 13.
Clark, Treatise, pp. 1–2.
- 14.
Lawlor, Consumption, p. 24; pp. 35–38.
- 15.
John Stearne, A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft (1648), in The Discovery of Witches and Witchcraft: The Writings of the Witchfinders Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, ed. by S.F. Davies (Brighton: Puckrel Publishing, 2007), pp. 9–50 (p. 50). A rumour emerged that Hopkins was actually hanged as a witch.
- 16.
Lawlor, Consumption, p. 167.
- 17.
The following section was written with particular reference to Peter D.O. Davies, ‘Respiratory Tuberculosis’, in Clinical Tuberculosis, ed. by Peter D.O. Davies, 3rd edn. (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. 108–124, and with guidance from Professor Davies, Professor J.M. Grange, and Dr Hugh McAllister. The disease descriptions are drawn from Clark’sTreatise, but filtered through Davies’ textbook to ensure correctness and clarity. Dormandy, White Death, pp. 22–25 and pp. 220–221, also provides descriptions useful to the lay reader.
- 18.
D.A. Enarson and Annik Rouillon, ‘The Epidemiological Basis of Tuberculosis Control’, in Clinical Tuberculosis, ed. by Peter D.O. Davies, 1st edn. (London: Chapman & Hall Medical, 1994), p. 21.
- 19.
See Jean-Paul Gaudillière and Ilana Löwy, ‘Introduction: Horizontal and Vertical Transmission of Diseases: The Impossible Separation’, in Heredity and Infection: The History of Disease Transmission, ed. by Gaudillière and Löwy (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1–17 (p. 6).
- 20.
Christopher Dye, ‘Epidemiology’, in Clinical Tuberculosis, ed. by Peter D.O. Davies, 3rd edn. (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. 21–42 (pp. 26–27).
- 21.
See J.M. Grange, ‘The Immunophysiology and Immunopathology of Tuberculosis’, in Clinical Tuberculosis, ed. by Peter D.O. Davies, 1st edn. (London: Chapman & Hall Medical, 1994), pp. 55–71 (p. 68).
- 22.
Regarding this paragraph, see Clark, Treatise, pp. 135–136, and p. 97.
- 23.
Dormandy, White Death, pp. 22–25 and p. 221; Clark, Treatise, pp. 82–107.
- 24.
Clark, Treatise, pp. 35–36.
- 25.
Katherine Byrne, ‘Consuming the Family Economy: Tuberculosis and Capitalism in Charles Dickens’sDombey and Son’, Nineteenth Century Contexts, 29 (2007), pp. 1–16 (p. 4); www.tandfonline.com [accessed 13th July 2007] discusses various diagnoses critics have made concerning Paul Dombey’s unnamed illness, and concludes that tuberculosis is the most likely culprit. Yet the fact that it has been debated at all indicates that the description is far from conclusive: a modern biomedical label for the child’s affliction may have been as unimportant to Dickens or his readers as it was to Stearne in 1648.
- 26.
Shakespeare, ‘Disability’, p. 106, makes this comparison. On historical forms of same-sex intimacy that do not resemble modern homosexuality, see David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 38; 132.
- 27.
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (1839), ed. by Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 637–638.
- 28.
Holmes, Fictions, p. 29.
- 29.
See Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 10, on ‘specialness’.
- 30.
David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 17–18.
- 31.
Dormandy, White Death, p. 39.
- 32.
Wittkower, Psychiatrist, pp. 43–44.
- 33.
C.C. Evans, ‘Historical Background’, in Clinical Tuberculosis, ed. by P.D.O. Davies (London: Chapman & Hall Medical, 1994), pp. 1–17 (p. 7).
- 34.
See Dormandy, White Death, pp. 36–37.
- 35.
As early as 1847, John Dix, ‘A Conversation on Consumption, Between a Physician and His Patient’, London Journal, 107 (13th March 1847), pp. 27–29, https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 2nd June 2017] explains consumption in terms of pathological processes that may be gleaned from Laënnec and/or Clark.
- 36.
Although Dormandy, White Death, p. 19, calls Clark ‘a lamentable doctor’, hisTreatise ‘became known as the tuberculosis doctor’s bible’ (p. 41): Clark was knighted and became Royal Physician. C.J.B. Williams was Professor of Medicine at University College London and Senior Consultant at the specialist Brompton Hospital for Consumption.
- 37.
C.J.B. Williams and Charles Theodore Williams, Pulmonary Consumption: Its Nature, Varieties, and Treatment (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1871), p. 1. Like many Victorian writers, Williams does not use the term ‘tuberculosis’, but the book is certainly describing a biomedical, not supernatural, model of the disease.
- 38.
Clark, Treatise, p. 22.
- 39.
See Carol J. Gill, ‘Disability, Constructed Vulnerability, and Socially Constructed Palliative Care’, Journal of Palliative Care, 22 (Autumn 2006), pp. 183–191; http://proquest.umi.com [accessed 24th October 2008].
- 40.
Squire, Hygienic, p. 189, provides a table of average weights of late-Victorian men, plus minimum healthy weights calculated for insurance purposes. Leadville Daily Herald (26 August 1884), p. 4; www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org [accessed 2nd June 2017] states that Dr J.H. Holliday (1851–1887), 5′10″ tall, weighed 122 lb; according to Squire’s table, the average weight for a late-Victorian man of that height was 168 lb. Benita Eisler, Chopin’s Funeral (London: Little Brown, 2003), p. 22, states that composer Fryderyk Chopin (1810–1849) was around 5′1″ and apparently weighed less than 100 lb, rather than the average 124 lb in Squire’s table.
- 41.
See W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (1914; London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 329, recalled that ‘when I arrived at our publisher’s I found Beardsley propped up on a chair in the middle of the room, grey and exhausted, and as I came in he left the chair and went into another room to spit blood, but returned immediately.’
- 42.
Max Beerbohm, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’ (1898), in The Incomparable Max: A Selection (London: Heinemann, 1962), pp. 85–93 (p. 87). Beardsley may simply have been drunk.
- 43.
Dormandy, White Death, p. 22, claims that, ‘until the 1950’s informed opinion […] reckoned that it was fatal in 80 per cent of cases in five to fifteen years’.
- 44.
Anne Hardy, ‘Reframing Disease: Changing Perceptions of Tuberculosis in England and Wales, 1938–70’, Historical Research, 76 (2003), pp. 535–556 (p. 535).
- 45.
Beardsley to Smithers (4th February 1897) in Letters AB, pp. 245–246.
- 46.
Beardsley to Raffalovich (30th March 1897), in Letters AB, p. 287.
- 47.
Wootton, Bad Medicine, p. 17.
- 48.
See Charles V. Chapin, ‘What Changes Has the Acceptance of the Germ Theory Made in Measures for the Prevention and Treatment of Consumption?’ Fiske Fund Prize Dissertation, No. 38 (Providence, RI, 1888) (reprinted in From Consumption to Tuberculosis, pp. 260–290). Beardsley disliked taking ergotine (see Letters AB, p. 144 and p. 269).
- 49.
Dormandy, White Death, pp. 273–277.
- 50.
N.S. Davis, Consumption: How to Prevent It and How to Live with It (Philadelphia and London: F.A. Davis, 1891), pp. 113–114.
- 51.
J.M. Buckley, A Hereditary Consumptive’s Successful Battle for Life (New York: Eaton & Mains, 1892; reprinted in Kessinger, 2006), p. 60.
- 52.
Squire, Hygienic, pp. 173–179.
- 53.
Clark, Treatise, p. 177.
- 54.
Arthur Newsholme, M.D., The Prevention of Tuberculosis (London: Methuen, 1908), pp. 49–50.
- 55.
See Wootton, Bad Medicine, p. 143, on bloodletting, and Hardy, ‘Reframing’, pp. 535–556, on possible explanations (e.g. higher protein diet) for TB changing from a killer of young adults to a chronic disease of older men in twentieth-century England.
- 56.
William Munk, Euthanasia, or Medical Treatment in Aid of an Easy Death (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1887), p. 4. See Longmate, Alive and Well p. 62, on hypodermic syringe for morphine.
- 57.
Ellen Beardsley to J.M. Dent (c.13th March 1898), Leeds University Brotherton Library, Elliot Collection: MS Beardsley. See also Sophie Laffitte, Chekhov, 1860–1904, trans. by Moura Budberg and Gordon Latta (Arts Book Society/Readers Union Group, 1974), p. 239, and especially Ernest J. Simmons, Chekhov: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963) on Chekhov’s death.
- 58.
Dormandy, White Death, p. 50, and Clark, Treatise, pp. 16–21.
- 59.
See Michael Worboys, ‘From Heredity to Infection: Tuberculosis, 1870–1890’, in Heredity and Infection: The History of Disease Transmission, ed. Jean-Paul Gaudillière and Löwy (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 81–100, on ‘seed and soil’ metaphors of tuberculosis.
- 60.
Squire, Hygienic, pp. 34; 131–132.
- 61.
‘Is Consumption Hereditary?’, Liverpool Mercury (Tuesday 11th May 1886), p. 3; http://find.galegroup.com, 19th-Century British Library Newspapers [accessed 21st November 2008]. This article queries the popular emphasis on heredity, and discusses recent statistics demonstrating that ‘only a tenth of deaths from consumption are cases where an hereditary taint is clearly traceable’, remarking that ‘the tables made in London and Paris show the exact reverse of what might be expected if hereditary predisposition has any real influence in the production of consumption’.
- 62.
Goring, On the Inheritance, p. 23. See Karl Pearson, A First Study of the Statistics of Pulmonary Tuberculosis, Draper’s Company Research Memoirs: Studies in National Deterioration, 2 (London: Dulau, 1907), p. 10, and Smith, Retreat, p. 39, discussing Pearson.
- 63.
Clark, Treatise, pp. 8–9; p. 13.
- 64.
George Thomas Congreve, On Consumption of the Lungs, or Decline; and Its Successful Treatment: Showing that Formidable Disease to Be Curable in All Its Stages, 2nd edn (London: published by the author and Elliot Stock, enlarged edition [1881(?)]), p. 3.
- 65.
Francis Galton and F.A. Mahomed, ‘An Inquiry into the Physiognomy of Phthisis by the Method of “Composite Portraiture”’, in Guys Hospital Reports, 25 (London: 1882), 475–493 (487). See Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 23, on Lombroso.
- 66.
Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p. 95.
- 67.
Clark, Treatise, pp. xiii–xiv.
- 68.
Francis Galton, ‘Studies in National Eugenics’, in Essays in Eugenics (1909; facsimile reprint, Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2004), pp. 60–67 (p. 64).
- 69.
Strahan, Marriage, p. 197.
- 70.
Strahan, Marriage, p. 200; p. 205.
- 71.
Apparently written by a Methodist minister in Georgia, the 1866 obituary of consumptive Alice Jane Holliday (mother of consumptive Wild West gunfighter ‘Doc’ Holliday) describes her as ‘a great sufferer’; see Albert S. Pendleton and Susan McKey Thomas, In Search of the Hollidays: The Story of Doc Holliday and His Holliday and McKey Families (Valdosta, GA: Little River Press, 1973), p. 11. The phrase was also used about Ellen Chadwick ‘The Famous Manchester Invalid’ in 1882, discussed by Frawley, Invalidism, p. 193.
- 72.
Francis Galton, ‘Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims’, in Essays in Eugenics (1909; facsimile reprint, Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2004), pp. 35–43 (p. 35, and p. 42). On this complex issue, see also John C. Waller, ‘Ideas of Heredity, Reproduction and Eugenics in Britain, 1800–1875’, in Studies in History of Philosophy, Biology, and Biomedical Science, 32 (2001), pp. 457–489; www.sciencedirect.com [accessed 5th August 2017]; Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), and Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995).
- 73.
Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Northgate, 1861), p. 190. See Richardson, Love and Eugenics, for a detailed discussion of eugenic morality and citizenship.
- 74.
Clark, Treatise, pp. 270–271.
- 75.
Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872; revised edition, 1901; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1970), p. 116.
- 76.
Henry Smith, A Plea for the Unborn: An Argument that Children Could, and Therefore Should, Be Born with a Sound Mind in a Sound Body, and that Man May Become Perfect by Means of Selection and Stirpiculture (London: Watts, 1897), p. 101.
- 77.
Alexander Walker, Intermarriage; or the mode in which, and the causes why, Beauty, Health and Intellect, result from certain unions, and Deformity, Disease and Insanity, from others (London: John Churchill, 1838), p. 370.
- 78.
Walker, Intermarriage, p. 370.
- 79.
Sir A. Carlisle, ‘Letter to the Author’, in Walker, Intermarriage, p. ii.
- 80.
J.M. DaCosta in ‘Discussion on the Advisability of the Registration of Tuberculosis’, in From Consumption to Tuberculosis: A Documentary History, ed. by Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), pp. 303–330 (p. 313) (first published in Transactions of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, ser. 3, 16 (1894), 2–27). As Dormandy, White Death, p. 237, points out, quoting from L. Darwin, British Medical Journal, 2 (1928), p. 257: ‘in the 1930s Major Leonard Darwin was still preaching birth control and voluntary sterilisation as a prophylactic remedy for the “undoubted hereditary nature of tuberculosis”.’
- 81.
[W.R. Greg], ‘On the Failure of ‘Natural Selection’ in the Case of Man’, Frasers Magazine, 78 (September 1868), pp. 353–362 (p. 361); https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 2nd June 2017]. The article is anonymous, but Richardson, Love and Eugenics, p. 61, identifies Greg as the author.
- 82.
Greg, ‘On the Failure’, p. 359.
- 83.
Royal Commission, p. 35.
- 84.
Royal Commission, p. 16.
- 85.
Squire, Hygienic, p. 62.
- 86.
Squire, Hygienic, p. 79.
- 87.
Gibson, ‘Cry of the Consumptives’, p. 649.
- 88.
David Doat, ‘Evolution and Human Uniqueness: Prehistory, Disability, and the Unexpected Anthropology of Charles Darwin’, in Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability, ed. by David Bolt (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 15–25 (p. 21).
- 89.
Newsholme, Prevention, p. 189. See p. 187 criticising Pearson’s arguments on hereditary diathesis.
- 90.
[Greg], ‘Failure’, p. 353; William Cecil Dampier Whetham and Catherine Durning Whetham, The Family and the Nation: A Study in National Inheritance and Social Responsibility (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), p. 6.
- 91.
See Davis, ‘Constructing Normalcy’, and Carolyn Burdett, ‘From The New Werther to Numbers and Arguments: Karl Pearson’s Eugenics’, in Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 204–231 (p. 204).
- 92.
See Arthur Newsholme, Fifty Years in Public Health: A Personal Narrative with Comments: The Years Preceding 1909 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935), pp. 258–259.
- 93.
Royal Commission, p. 35.
- 94.
The compulsory notification of tuberculosis in 1912 was an attempt to control contagion rather than breeding, and was accompanied by the (dysgenic) incentive of ‘sanatorium benefit’ to persuade citizens to cooperate. See Newsholme, Fifty Years, p. 262.
- 95.
Edward Manson, ‘Eugenics and Legislation’, Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation, n.s., 13 (1912), pp. 123–129 (p. 129); www.jstor.org [accessed 25th March 2009].
- 96.
Julius Henry Steinau, Pathological and Philosophical Essay on Hereditary Diseases, with Appendix on Intermarriage, and the Inheritance of the Tendency to Moral Depravities and Crimes (London: Simpkin, Marshal & Co., 1843), p. 27; 35.
- 97.
Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, p. 41. Weismann’s ‘hard’ heredity would gain the upper hand with the 1900 rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s experiments. See Daniel J. Kevles, ‘Genetics in the United States and Great Britain, 1890–1930: A Review with Speculations’, Isis, 71 (September 1980), pp. 441–455, www.jstor.org [accessed 25th March 2009] on conflicts between biometry (of which Pearson was an exponent) and Mendelism.
- 98.
Squire, Hygienic, p. 59 (his italics). See also Bowditch, ‘Consumption in America’, p. 63.
- 99.
Squire, Hygienic, p. 33 and p. 109.
- 100.
Charles B. Davenport, ‘Euthenics and Eugenics’, Popular Science Monthly (January 1911), pp. 16–20 (p. 20).
- 101.
Pearson, First Study, p. 15. These optimistic medical men were proved correct by a 1944 study of children living with tubercular fathers in the healthy environment of Papworth Village Settlement. See Eleanor Birks, Papworth Hospital and Village Settlement: Pendrill Varrier-Jones’ Dream Realised (Papworth Everard: Papworth Hospital, 1999), p. 49.
- 102.
Smith, Retreat, p. 37.
- 103.
Dr Bowditch, ‘Prevention’, p. 227.
- 104.
See J.A. and Olive Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964), p. 122.
- 105.
See C.W. Saleeby, ‘The Methods of Eugenics’ ([n.p., n. pub., October 1910), p. 282, on ‘sterilisation of the unfit’ by ‘vasectomy or salpingectomy’ and ‘Röntgen rays’. See also Dr Robert Reid Rentoul, Proposed Sterilization of Certain Mental and Physical Degenerates: An Appeal to Asylum Managers and Others (London and Newcastle-on-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing, 1903).
- 106.
Havelock Ellis, The Problem of Race Regeneration (London: Cassell, 1911), p. 70.
- 107.
Kearns, ‘Tuberculosis’, p. 152, remarks that, as Medical Officer to the Local Government Board 1908–1919, Newsholme never advocated the use of condoms to prevent venereal disease or to allow ‘unfit’ individuals to marry without reproducing.
- 108.
See Banks, Feminism, pp. 88–91 on Bradlaugh and Besant.
- 109.
Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 392–403.
- 110.
J.A. Symonds, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. by Phyllis Grosskurth (London: Hutchinson, 1984), pp. 260–261.
- 111.
Strahan, Marriage, p. 170.
- 112.
Smith, Plea, p. 27 and 101. See Chap. 5 on Jude.
- 113.
Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), p. 39.
- 114.
Royal Commission, p. 34.
- 115.
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861), ed. by Victor Neuburg (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 429–430.
- 116.
Clarke, Studies, p. 29; Newsholme, Prevention, p. 16.
- 117.
Beardsley to Smithers (31st May 1897), in Letters AB, p. 328.
- 118.
Ruth Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007), p. 109.
- 119.
Thomson, Extraordinary, p. 42.
- 120.
Chopin to Wojciech Grzymala (30th October 1848), in Selected Correspondence of Fryderyk Chopin, collected by Bronislaw Edward Sydow, trans. and ed. by Arthur Hedley (London: Heinemann, 1962), p. 349.
- 121.
‘Sparuls’ Case’, Appendix No. III. Handed in by Mr J. Theodore Dodd, Oxford (Q.25612), in Royal Commission, p. 521.
- 122.
Birks, Papworth, p. 35.
- 123.
Squire, Hygienic, p. 141.
- 124.
In Russia, Anton Chekhov raised money to build a home for dying consumptives in the last years of his life. Extracts from his appeal, ‘Help the Dying’ (1902), are quoted in Laffitte, Chekhov, p. 214.
- 125.
Wittkower, Psychiatrist, pp. 81–82.
- 126.
Andrew Mearns and William Carnall Preston, ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor’ (London: 1883) in Homes of the London Poor and The Bitter Cry of Outcast London; Cass Library of Victorian Times No. 6 (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1970), p. 17.
- 127.
Royal Commission, p. 515.
- 128.
Clarke, Studies, p. 29.
- 129.
Beardsley to Raffalovich (3rd April 1897), in Letters AB, p. 292.
- 130.
Chekhov to Maria Chekhova (28th June 1904), in Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters, ed. by Rosamund Bartlett; trans. by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 531; subsequently referenced as Letters AC.
- 131.
Beardsley to Smithers (28th April 1896), p. 127, and to Raffalovich (13th April 1897), pp. 301–302, in Letters AB. See also Chekhov to Olga Knipper-Chekhova (4th March 1903), in Letters AC, p. 512.: ‘Are you moving to a new apartment? What floor is it on? If it’s very high it will take me half an hour to get there.’
- 132.
G.B. Iollos, Berlin correspondent to Russian News (July 1904), quoted in Simmons, Chekhov, p. 634.
- 133.
In Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), ed. by Nicola Bradbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 542, Gilbert Osmond states that consumptive Ralph Touchett ‘ought never to have come; it’s worse than an imprudence for people in that state to travel; it’s a kind of indelicacy. […] Other people invariably have to look after him.’ Osmond’s statement is presented to the reader as unacceptable, but not necessarily exceptional.
- 134.
Beardsley to Raffalovich (30th October 1896), in Letters AB, p. 194. In September 1897, Smithers complained to Wilde that ‘it seems hopeless to try and get any connected work out of [Beardsley] of any kind’ (quoted in Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, p. 366n). Beardsley later received a pension from Raffalovich, allowing him to die in relative comfort.
- 135.
Vincent O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde (London: Constable, 1936), p. 86.
- 136.
Clark, Treatise, pp. 270–271.
- 137.
Gill, ‘Disability’, pp. 185–186.
- 138.
John Keats to Charles Brown (30 November 1820), in John Keats, Letters, ed. by Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 398. Subsequently referenced as Letters JK.
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Tankard, A. (2018). Medical and Social Influences on Consumptive Identity, 1821–1912. In: Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71446-2_2
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