Abstract
It is well known that consumption is a fashionable disease: Susan Sontag contrasted it with cancer, and called it a disease of the self, a disease that expressed something about the personality of the sufferer. Historians and literary critics have written at length about consumption’s social and cultural cachet in various domains: religion, spirituality, the good death, secular love melancholy, female beauty, male genius, and the various connections between them. Consumption has been the subject of much literary production, and much of it stresses consumption’s potential benefits to the sufferer. However, not all strands of consumptive imagery are positive, and not all lend themselves to the apparently dominant artistic representations of the condition.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Susan Sontag (1979) Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books); Roberta Barker (2014) ‘The Gallant Invalid: The Stage Consumptive and the Making of a Canadian Myth’, Theatre Research in Canada (Spring), 35:1, 69–88; Helen Bynum (2012) Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Katherine Byrne (2010) Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Cambridge University Press); Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki (2000) ‘The Disease of the Self: Representations of Consumption 1700–1830’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74, 258–94; Clark Lawlor (2006) Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Basingstoke: Palgrave).
- 2.
J. Shirley (1655) The Gentleman of Venice, A Tragi-Comedie (London: Humphrey Moseley), Act 1, p. 3.
- 3.
(1904) The Life and Opinions of John Buncle Esquire (London: Routledge), pp. 371–73.
- 4.
G. du Bartas (1621) ‘Adam, the Third part of the first day of the second week’, ‘The Furies’, Du Bartas: His Divine Weekes And Workes, Josuah Sylvester (trans.) (London: H. Lownes), pp. 212–13, ll. 549–56.
- 5.
C. Brockden Brown (1799–1800) Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, 2 vols (Philadelphia: H. Maxwell), vol. 1, ch. 14, p. 138.
- 6.
(1964) ‘A Letter to a Friend, Upon the Occasion of the Death of His Intimate Friend’, in L. C. Martin (ed.), Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici and Other Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 177–96: originally published posthumously in London, 1690. For some background to the relationship between religion and medicine in this period, see A. Wear (1985) ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England’, in R. Porter (ed.), Patients and Practitioners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 55–100; a useful volume for the general area is (1996) Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, Ole Peter Grell and A. Cunningham (ed.) (Aldershot: Scolar Press). For Browne’s intellectual context, see Kevin Killeen (2009) Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (Farnham: Ashgate).
- 7.
For the American reception, see Katherine Ott (1996) Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture Since 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 15.
- 8.
J. Taylor (1989) Holy Living and Holy Dying, Vol. II: Holy Dying, D. G. Smallwood (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press), ch. 4, sect. i, ‘Of the Practise of Patience’, pp. 123–24.
- 9.
See Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, p. 32.
- 10.
T. Fuller (1655) Life Out of Death. A Sermon Preached at Chelsey, on the Recovery of an Honourable Person (London: J. Williams), pp. 20–21.
- 11.
(1830) The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter, W. Orme (ed.), 23 vols (London: J. Duncan), iv, p. 449.
- 12.
T. Beard (1597) ‘Of Those that Persecuted the Sonne of God, and His Church’, The Theatre of Gods Judgements: Or, a Collection of Histories Out of Sacred, Ecclesiasticall, and Prophane Authours […] Translated Out of French (London: Adam Islip), Bk. 1, ch. 12, p. 31.
- 13.
J. Bunyan (1680) The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, Presented to the World in a Familiar Dialogue Between Mr. Wiseman, and Mr. Attentive (London: Printed by J. A. for Nath. Ponder [etc.]), pp. 321–22, 300–1.
- 14.
John Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, pp. 323, 302.
- 15.
My thanks to Prof. David Walker for this observation, and other very helpful comments on Protestantism in relation to my topic.
- 16.
This plurality of conditions bringing about the appropriate moral conclusion accords well with Richard L. Greaves’s statement that ‘In Bunyan’s world, divine and satanic agencies freely interacted to accomplish through providence, God’s decrees of election and reprobation. Natural causality was subordinate to and a vehicle of this providence’ ([2002] Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent [Stanford: Stanford University Press], pp.274–290 [p. 283]).
- 17.
(1909) The Confessions of St Augustine, E. Bouverie Pusey (trans.) (London: Chatto and Windus), Bk. 2, ch. 7.
- 18.
See R. Sha (2003) ‘Medicalizing the Romantic Libido: Sexual Pleasure, Luxury, and the Public Sphere’, Romanticism on the Net, Number 31, August, http://id.erudit.org/revue/ron/2003/v/n31/008698ar.html (accessed 19 January 2016).
- 19.
pp. 304, 283.
- 20.
D. W. Atkinson (c. 1992) The English Ars Moriendi (New York: P. Lang), p. 49.
- 21.
(1759) ‘The Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe’, Poems on Several Occasions […] To Which is Prefixed an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author (London: D. Midwinter), p. 25.
- 22.
See Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, p. 28; D. Ryder (1939) The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–1716, W. Matthews (transcribed from shorthand and ed.) (London: Methuen), p. 345.
- 23.
(1999) ‘The Age of Decency: 1660–1760’, Death in England: An Illustrated History, P. C. Jupp and C. Gittings (eds) (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 183.
- 24.
R. Houlbrooke (1998) Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 203.
- 25.
See P. Jalland (1996) Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 17–19.
- 26.
(1662) Flamma Sine Fumo: Or, Poems Without Fictions (London: William Leake [etc.]), ll. 163–66.
- 27.
For good summaries of medical theories from classical medicine, see L. S. King (ed.) (1982) ‘Consumption: the Story of a Disease’, in Medical Thinking: An Historical Preface (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 16–69; Walter Pagel (1955) ‘Humoral Pathology: A Lingering Anachronism in the History of Tuberculosis,’ Bulletin for the History of Medicine, 29, 299–308.
- 28.
G. van Swieten (1776) Commentaries Upon Boerhaave’s Aphorisms, 18 vols (London: J. Murray), xii, p. 1.
- 29.
C. Bennet (1656) Theatrum Tabidorum (London: Thompson), cited in van Swieten, Commentaries, p. 131.
- 30.
See (1939) The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, T. Johnson (intro. and ed.) (NY: Rockland Editions), pp. 13–14.
- 31.
(1960) ‘“In whom are hid all the Treasures of Wisdom, and Knowledge”, 3d.9m [November] 1695’, The Poems of Edward Taylor, D. E. Stanford (ed.) (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 104–5, ‘Preparatory Meditations’, 14. Meditation. Col. 2.3.
- 32.
See K. Johnson (2014) Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), ch. 2, for the influence of Herbert on Taylor.
- 33.
For the debates surrounding Protestant poetics in this period, see Brian Cummings (2002) The Literary Culture of the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Jeanne Shami (2003) John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (Cambridge: Brewer); Debora Shuger (1990) Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press); Nigel Smith (1989) Perfection Proclaimed (Oxford: Clarendon Press); for Taylor in particular, see ch. 12 of Barbara Lewalski’s (1979) Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
- 34.
Van Swieten, Commentaries, p. 130.
- 35.
For more on Taylor’s Protestant imagery, see Lewalski, pp. 389–402.
- 36.
N. Hookes (1653) ‘An Elegie on the Death of Mr. Frear Fellow of Trin. Coll. in Cambridge, Who Died of a Consumption’, Amanda, A Sacrifice to an Unknown Goddesse, or, a Free-Will Offering of a Loving Heart to a Sweet-Heart (London: Humphrey Tuckey [etc.]), pp. 106–108.
- 37.
Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, p. 38.
- 38.
See, for example, Laurinda S. Dixon’s wonderfully illustrated (2013) The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500–1700 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press).
- 39.
For a convenient introduction to the new medicine and its relation to mechanical philosophy, see Roy Porter (1997) The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (London: Fontana), pp. 201–48; for more details, see (1990) The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
- 40.
H. Baker (1726) ‘An Invocation of Health’, The Second Part of Original Poems: Serious and Humorous (London: Printed for the Author), pp. 92–93, ll. 96–105.
- 41.
J. Gay (1926) ‘The Court of Death’, The Poetical Works, G. C. Faber (ed.) (London: Oxford University Press), Fable XLVII, ll. 31–36.
- 42.
Milton, Paradise Lost, xi. pp. 469–89; for a classical precedent, see Aeneid, vi. p. 236 ff.
- 43.
E. Rowe (1804) The Poetical Works of Mrs. Elizh Rowe, Including the History of Joseph, in Ten Books and an Account of Her Life and Writings (London: Suttaby), p. xxv.
- 44.
E. Rowe, The Poetical Works, pp. 91–94.
- 45.
J. Miller (1741) ‘Verses to the Memory of Mrs. Elizabeth Frankland’, Miscellaneous Work in Verse and Prose, Vol. 1 (no further vols published) (London: T. Cooper), pp. 100–4, ll. 132–49.
- 46.
See Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 217–19.
Bibliography
Bunyan, J. (1680) The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, Presented to the World in a Familiar Dialogue Between Mr. Wiseman, and Mr. Attentive (London: Printed by J. A. for Nath. Ponder).
Shirley, J. (1655) The Gentleman of Venice, A Tragi-Comedie (London: Humphrey Moseley).
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Lawlor, C. (2016). ‘Halfe Dead: and rotten at the Coare: my Lord!’: Fashionable and Unfashionable Consumption, from Early Modern to Enlightenment. In: Ingram, A., Wetherall Dickson, L. (eds) Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59718-2_9
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