That said, it’s important to note that the idealization of the small body did not mean the end of consumptive stigmatization. Once again, we see the commingling of romance and stigma in the way women’s bodies are imagined, sometimes within a single sentence, as when one eighteenth-century magazine extolled the virtues of a consumptive body type: “The beauty of women is greatly owing to their delicacy, or weakness.” One romantic word to describe the beauty standard—delicacy—followed by a stigmatizing one—weakness.
