SOURCE: "Erotic Susceptibility and Tuberculosis: Literary Images of a Pathology," in MLN, Vol. 105, No. 5, December, 1990, pp. 1016-31.

In the following essay, Latimer observes that in works by such authors as Thomas Mann and Edgar Allan Poe characters afflicted with tuberculosis are associated with erotic and artistic qualities.

What is striking about tuberculosis as a disease—in contrast to other important disease representations—syphilis, let's say, or leprosy—is that tuberculosis gets remarkably good press from writers of belles lettres—especially in the first two-thirds of the 19th century. Rend and Jean Dubos characterize this literary treatment as "perverted sentimentalism," and indeed, considering the nastiness of the disease and its ubiquity, it is hard to imagine at first why permanent diarrhea, ceaseless coughing, spitting up of yellow phlegm then bright red blood, having a grotesquely swollen neck after the lymph nodes have bagged a few of the circulating bacilli...