The Arts and Tuberculosis Trivia Quiz

Answer: Pale, slim and languid was the fashionable look of the day

The end of the quote is, "...because then the women would all say, 'see that poor Byron - how interesting he looks in dying!'"

Tuberculosis (aka TB, consumption, phthisis, scrofula, white death and others) is an infectious disease of the lungs that has afflicted us globally for at least 9000 years. It became a serious killer in Europe and North America around the end of the 18th century, as the Industrial Revolution kicked in and people started to move into cities. Weirdly, the prevalence of the disease prompted the 'consumptive' look in high-class fashion that would last for most of the 19th century. Ladies would paint themselves white, pinch their cheeks to get that fashionable hectic flush and use belladonna drops in their eyes to dilate their pupils. Byron himself tended to put on weight easily and was a slave to reducing diets to achieve the slender figure that was so in demand.

Answer: John Keats

' ...I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain...' ('Ode to a Nightingale', 1818)

John Keats died of TB at the age of 25. By that time his mother and his younger brother had already died of the same disease. He had been publishing for only four years prior to his death and at that time he was not particularly well known outside a small circle of intellectual friends. After his death his poetry soared in popularity and would inspire writers throughout the century. His death also leant credence to a theory that tuberculosis stimulated mental acuity and creativity. As one doctor wrote in 1891, "Tuberculosis patients particularly young talented individuals . . . display enormous intellectual capacity of the creative kind." By the middle of the century, Alexandre Dumas would write, "It was the fashion to suffer from the lungs; everybody was consumptive, poets especially; it was good form to spit blood after any emotion that was at all sensational, and to die before reaching the age of thirty."

Answer: The Lady of the Camellias

Marie died of tuberculosis at the age of 23 in 1847. The daughter of a tailor, she taught herself to read and write and moved into fashionable circles as a witty and sweet-natured courtesan, wearing signature white (available) or red (not available) camellias in her hair. Among her lovers were Alexandre Dumas and Franz Liszt. Dumas published 'La Dame aux Camélias' a year after her death and it was an immediate sensation. Verdi's opera 'La Traviata' premiered in 1855. Both the novel and the opera emphasised the frantic 'live for today' spirit of one who knows her days are numbered.

These fictional Maries exhibited the heightened sexuality and even promiscuity that victims of tuberculosis were thought to display.

Answer: Jane Eyre

"I am very happy, Jane; and when you hear that I am dead, you must be sure and not grieve. We all must die one day, and the illness which is removing me is not painful; it is gentle and gradual: my mind is at rest." (Jane Eyre, 1847)

Even with the spectacular toll TB took on the population of Britain mid-century (9 million dead, 1850-1900), the Bronte family were exceptional. The two oldest children, Maria and Elizabeth, died of the disease as children in 1825. Emily, Branwell and Anne died within six months of each other in 1847-48. Charlotte herself would succumb to the disease in 1855. Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte's biographer, stated that Charlotte had told her that Helen Burns was modeled after her sister Maria, apparently a precocious and extremely devout child.

In 'Jane Eyre', Helen Burns is a Christ-like figure; suffering punishment meekly, with her eyes always fixed on Heaven. She is wasting away from tuberculosis, but as she fades, her light shines all the brighter. The figure of the dying child as angel would appear many times in art and literature over the course of the century.

Answer: Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Siddal was a working class girl who became the first supermodel; a favorite of the Pre-Raphaelites, including Deverell, Holman Hunt and Millais. She began an affair with Rossetti and married him in 1860, when she was already ill with tuberculosis. She died in 1863 at the age of 32, and Rossetti used sketches he had made of her on her deathbed as inspiration for 'Beata Beatrix'.

Despite her fame, Siddal was a troubled woman who suffered from depression and an addiction to laudanum (opium). Rossetti himself didn't think she died of tuberculosis; the white poppy she holds in the painting was a symbol of what he believed she died of - drug addiction. Her biographer Emily Boyle suggests that what killed her was anorexia nervosa. The clues were there ("I haven't eaten in a fortnight") and the symptoms of anorexia could be easily mistaken for TB. She further suggests that the quest for the right look in the 19th century might have prompted an awful lot of of misdiagnosed eating disorders.

Answer: HIV/AIDS

'Rent' was produced 100 years after 'La Boheme'. The opera is still going strong but there is some debate as to whether the musical will last a similar length of time. In 2005, for example, Roger Ebert called it "...a cultural artifact and a statement about AIDS." This is the essential difference between the two productions. Larsen's 'Rent' is about the slow response to an epidemic, about gender fluidity, drug addiction, friendship and love. 'Boheme' is about friendship and love, and Mimi's tragic death from tuberculosis adds pathos to the drama, but it is not an indictment.

One aspect of TB that the opera did reflect, however, was a response to a fundamental change in attitude to who got it. By the end of the century, TB was no longer the cool disease that poets and rich ladies got, earlier in the 19th century. In the eyes of the world it had become a disease of the poor, in particular the workers who crowded the slums of North American and European cities.

It is somewhat ironic that Ebert calls a work concerning AIDS an 'artifact'. In actuality, both AIDS and tuberculosis have continued to be very real issues into the 21st century.

Answer: Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric Chopin, the 'Poet of the Piano' was born in Poland in 1810 and grew up a very sickly child. Despite this he became a composer with a prodigious piano technique; when at 21 he moved to Paris, he became an overnight sensation. He checked all the boxes for a mid-century TB diagnosis; he was frail, a genius, he coughed and sometimes spat up blood.

Although he was diagnosed with tuberculosis as an adult, he managed to maintain a very successful career and form a relationship with the author George Sand. A bout of influenza laid him low in 1837, and curiously, his doctor insisted that he was not consumptive. He died in 1849, and the attending physician stated that he died of 'consumption of the lungs and larynx'.

The debate over what exactly Chopin was suffering from prompted doctors in 2014 to inspect his heart, which is preserved in a jar of alcohol in the cathedral in Warsaw. They could not open the jar, but noticed tubercular nodules and concluded that it was TB after all that the composer had died from.

Answer: Racism

Before the 1880s, people weren't sure how exactly you contracted tuberculosis. Some put it down to heredity, others to a physical or intellectual predisposition. After 1882, when Dr. Robert Koch identified the cause of tuberculosis and how contagious it was, at a time when one in every seven North Americans were dying of the disease, things started to change.

One of the first things to go were spittoons. Those 'ashtrays for spit', seen everywhere due to the popularity of chewing tobacco, were banned and spitting in public became illegal. Chewing tobacco would largely be replaced by cigarettes. Those whalebone corsets that constricted women's lungs were being replaced by gentler ones of rubber and fabric. The fussy, overcrowded interiors the Victorians loved were stripped down in favour of clean, uncluttered, 'healthy' rooms.

With the influx of immigrants into overcrowded North American inner cities, racism got a boost. No longer the 'romantic' disease, TB became the 'Jewish disease'. They weren't accused of poisoning the wells any more; in the popular imagination Jews had become spreaders of contagion. This was ironic because numbers in both North America and Europe showed that Jews were statistically far less likely to contract the disease. Many politicians ignored the science and howled for immigration to be restricted to 'hardier' northern European stock. TB had stopped being romantic. It had become political.

Answer: The Magic Mountain

By the end of the 19th century, tuberculosis sanatoria were all over Europe and North America. Medical experts believed that fresh mountain air, rest, and treatment were ideal for consumptives. In Thomas Mann's 1924 novel 'The Magic Mountain' a young man, Hans Castorp, visits one and ends up spending seven years there. At the 'Berghof' Hans experiences a microcosm of pre-war European thought, politics and manners. He also gets to experience modern medical technology.

Soon after Hans has arrived, a patient shows him his X-ray plate. "You carry it in a case. Like a certificate, as it were a sort of membership card," he explains. When Clavdia gives him her plate as a memento, it is the most intimate thing she can leave with her lover. And in particular, the fluoroscope is an object of fascination.

"'Look at his heart,' and the Hofrat lifted his huge hand again from his thigh and pointed with his forefinger at the pulsating shadow. Good God, it was the heart, it was Joachim's honor-loving heart that Hans Castorp saw! 'I am looking at your heart,' he said in a suppressed voice."

The fluoroscope was invented by Edison in 1896, a year after Roentgen introduced the X-ray.

Answer: Ringo Starr

Ringo Starr, the legendary drummer for the Beatles, was born in 1940 in a slum in inner city Liverpool. At the age of 6 he contracted peritonitis and spent a year in the hospital. Then, when he was 13, he fell ill with tuberculosis and spent two years in a sanatorium.

While there, a doctor suggested he join the band, and gave him a wooden bobbin on a stick that he could bang on a little tambourine, boxes, and his bedside table with. He got a book about drumming and really started to work. When he left the sanitorium, he was committed. "I was in the hospital band ... That's where I really started playing. I never wanted anything else from there on." After he returned home he continued to drum with local bands and in 1959, he joined the Beatles.