Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

by John Green

There were simply too many cases for consumption to be understood as a disease caused by immorality or weakness. Something had to be done—if not about the disease, then at least about our imagining of it. And so, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans came to romanticize consumption, to see the illness as beautiful and ennobling. It’s tempting to imagine this romanticization as the opposite of stigmatization—rather than discounting people as stigma does, romanticization lifts them up as paragons of beauty or intellect or some other virtue. But really, I see these as complementary strategies used to make the sick into an “other,” a group of people fundamentally distant and different from the rest of the social order. Mental illness, for example, is often romanticized as bringing on creative genius or other superpowers. Brilliant detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Adrian Monk are portrayed as having their powers of detection enhanced by their obsessive thought spirals even as they are also stigmatized for their eccentric and off-putting behavior.