Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

by Jennifer Wright

As is, tragically, still the case today when some women engage in destructive behaviors, people didn’t want to help Lizzie so much as they wanted to praise how fashionable and skinny she looked. When the painter Ford Madox Brown visited her, he enthused, “Miss Siddal—looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful and more ragged than ever.”34 (Deathlike and beautiful went together so easily.) In Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination Katherine Byrne writes, “It seems that [Siddal’s] desirability lay in her fragility and that she was special because she always seemed hovering on the verge of death, and looked as though she was not quite of this world.”35 This poor depressed, drug addicted, possibly anorexic woman.