Avescope Memento Mori

The horseman, as a general rule, doesn’t like it when you die
pretty.
Except for tuberculosis. The disease which spawned a fashion
trend and made one ‘beautiful’. Tuberculosis gave us the
original version of ‘heroin chic’ in fashion. Have you ever
noticed those fashionable Victorian women in paintings with
their translucently pale skin, the red lips, the huge, shining
eyes, the sharp cheekbones stained with pink? You might have
thought it was just the corsets but you would be mistaken.
Tuberculosis or TB, also known as consumption, was rife in the
industrial revolution cities of the 1800s. It attacked young and
old. Rich and poor. It wasted a person away from constant
coughing, hence the name ‘consumption’. The ancient Greeks
believed it was a fire, burning one up. So many people had it,
that those who didn’t aped the physical appearance of it. Think
on it from our perspective. Who wouldn’t want to be waifish,
pale, thin, and a little tragic?
Until you started coughing your lungs up and dying, that is.
Tuberculosis was a fact of life. It was considered a condition
and a predisposition of ill health. In fact, there is no single
disease that has had a bigger influence on art and literature in
Western civilization. Consumption was almost romantic. More
than five operas feature a character with the disease. Many
books have been written about it. So many poets and authors
had tuberculosis in the 1800s that it was practically a
requirement of the job. They said the constant mild fever of the
disease helped artists to see the world more clearly.
Tuberculosis helped in the migration of people across the
United States and Canada. People who had TB were told to
leave the cities to find better air. A heroic cure. Towns on the
coasts and in the deserts of the south-west of the United States
billed themselves as cures for the rich and consumptive. They
actively advertised for those with tuberculosis to come and
settle. The towns of New Mexico, in particular, capitalized on
the ‘lungers’ who came in their hundreds in hope of survival in
the dry desert heat. For some, it even worked. But the mortality
rate of TB was high. 1 in 4 British citizens would die of TB in the
1820s and as many as 1 in 6 French citizens would die of TB in
the 1910s.
But the romance of tuberculosis came to a grinding halt when
a German doctor named Dr. Robert Koch identified the
bacteria which caused the disease. Now it wasn’t a condition. It
was an infection and those who had it were infectious. The
celebrated now became the shunned. People with TB were
packed off to sanatoriums where they could be away from
society in a manner not dissimilar to lepers. For the poor, they
were like prisons. In New York City, they were barges on the
Hudson River where the sick were packed from dawn to dusk.
For they rich they were decidedly more luxurious.
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