Katherine Byrne: Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination

• Flurin Condrau

This book explores the complex relationship between Victorian literature and tuberculosis. Despite all the literary grandeur and a number of well known novels, modern studies of the relationship between medicine and literature are not all that common. Tuberculosis is of course a fascinating topic – a deadly disease of the adult population, it proved very difficult to understand: nineteenth century medical ideas initially focused on the constitutional character of the disease and emphasised physical weakness as the major couse. Later the discussion turned towards the so-called degeneration of society, which understood individual cases as indicators of broader social problems. Finally, germ theories and more specifically, bacteriology highlighted the contagious nature of the disease as the basis for control strategies. While limiting itself to novels, thus missing all the other literary formats such as songs and poems, the book uses the history of tuberculosis as the background to study key novels highlighting the relationship between disease and literature over the course of the nineteenth century.