From Susan Sontag's /Illness as Metaphor/:
TB is often imagined as a disease of poverty and deprivation--of thin garments, thin bodies, unheated rooms, poor hygeine, inadequate food. The poverty may not be as literal as Mimi's garret in La Boheme; the tubercular Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux camelias lives in luxury, but inside she is a waif.
The TB patient was thought to be helped, even cured, by a change in environment. There was a notion that TB was a wet disease, a disease of humid and dank cities. The inside of the body became damp (moisture in the lungs" was a favored locution) and had to be dried out. Doctors advised travel to high, dry places--the mountains, the desert.
TB is thought to be relatively painless. For over a hundred years TB remained the preferred way of giving death a meaning--an edifying, refined disease. Nineteenth-century literature is stocked with descriptions of almost symptomless, unfrightened, beatific deaths from TB, particularly of young people, such as Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dombey's son Paul in Dombey as Son and Smike in Nicholas Nickleby, where Dickens described TB as the "dread disease" which "refines" death: "of its grosser aspect...in which the struggle between soul and body is so gradual, quiet, and solemn, and the result so sure, that day by day, and grain by grain, the mortal part wastes and withers away, so that the spirit grows light and sanguine with its lightening load..."
As we have observed different representations of TB--visual illustrations, the obituary for Doc Holliday, the short film on drug-resistant strains in Peru, Maugham's "Sanatorium"--we have noted many of the associations that Sontag outlines above. I wonder if we can turn our shared attention to how these seemingly contradictory characteristics/features (poverty AND refinement, deprivation AND beauty) are connected. Where, in the representations we have looked at, have we seen these characteristics linked to the physical signs and symptoms? Do the apparent contradictions come from the different features of the physical disease? Or do they originate elsewhere? Are they contradictions at all? Please cite specific examples from our texts to support your thoughts.
