Toward the end of the nineteenth century, consumption began to decline in northern Europe and the U.S. as well. In the process, romanticization of the disease was abandoned. The decline happened in part because, as quality of life rose for the wealthy and the emerging middle class, they were less likely to live or work in crowded spaces where consumption can flourish. Increasingly, it was the poor who seemed to get sick, and so people began to turn their eyes away from “the languorous, fainting young women and their romantic lovers,” wrote René and Jean Dubos.
