Extract
Many readers of Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease by Carolyn A. Day, Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Furman University, will be familiar with the well-known nineteenth-century victims of consumption about whom the author writes—John Keats, the Brontë siblings, and Marie Duplessis (the model for Alexandre Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias)—and the disease’s reputation as the ‘ultimate’ form of Romantic death. Probably less familiar will be the complicated narrative put forward by medical practitioners, social commentators, and contributors to fashion journals and etiquette books in Britain in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries that created the mythology of tuberculosis. In the introduction to this meticulously researched and fascinating socio-cultural study of a disease that, at its peak, accounted for 25 per cent of all deaths in Europe, Day asks how this illness with its horrible symptoms ‘became not only a sign of beauty, but also a fashionable disease’ and identifies her ‘overarching concerns’ as ‘the practical application of this rhetoric and the ways in which consumption became both idealized and feminized’ (p. 2).
