Tuberculosis in art

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.

Additional recommended knowledge

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Portrayals

Opera and theatre:

• Mimì, the heroine of Puccini's opera, La bohème suffers from tuberculosis.
• Marguerite Gautier, heroine of Alexandre Dumas, fils' novel and play The Lady of the Camellias, dies of tuberculosis. The same story was adapted as the opera La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi (heroine's name changed to Violetta Valéry) and, more loosely, as the movie Moulin Rouge! where Satine dies of tuberculosis.
• Edmund, the protagonist of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night is diagnosed with TB at the start of the play, which deals, in part, with his subsequent mental anguish.
• 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:

• The latter half of Erich Maria Remarque's novel Three Comrades focuses on Patricia Hollman's love of life in light of her ultimately futile struggle with tuberculosis.
• 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.
• Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain takes place at a Sanitarium where all the characters suffer from tuberculosis.
• 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.
• 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"
• Fantine in Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables suffers and dies from "consumption".
• Sheilagh Fielding in Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams suffers from tuberculosis, despite her father being a doctor, which understandably brings shame upon her family in Newfoundland.
• Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle portrays tuberculosis as common among bovine in the meat-packing plants of Chicago; consumption is a common illness for packers.

Nonfiction

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

Film:

• 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.

Graphic art:

• The Sick Child (first version from 1886) by Edvard Munch, portrait of his sister Sophie, who died of TB at 16.^[1][2]
• 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.

See also

• List of tuberculosis victims

Notes