The Consumptive’s Kiss: Tuberculosis and the Elegance of Death

His pedals scraping the earth beneath him, the errand boy approaches a colony of cottages: an isolated world of waxen inhabitants lying in the sunlight.

December 1954 – The boy, now called Dr. Wack, recalls delivering tuberculosis medicine from Hadley’s Drug Store to the Wayne Sanatorium in an interview with Emma Patterson for the Suburban & Wayne Times. The colony of “curing cottages” is pictured without patients on a postcard that was once sold at Hadley’s but is now buried in its basement, beneath the records and artifacts of the old drug store.¹

December 2021 – The postcard and Patterson’s column are buried in the Radnor Historical Society’s archives. I study the cottages, sepia and still. Tuberculosis patients have long pervaded art as romantic sufferers, but here, they’re invisible. I wonder how they compare to Dostoevsky’s Katerina Ivanovna, flushed and violent, and Alexandre Dumas’ woefully enamored Marguerite.

The same disease that harrowed the sanatorium shaped a century’s culture and fashion. Many creatives – from painters to writers – chronicled their own experience with tuberculosis within their art. Such a practice inspired an association between the disease and brilliant surges of genius. Tuberculosis was also socially considered to heighten emotions. In her 1978 novel “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag reflects that “TB is a disease of time; it speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes it. In both English and French, consumption ‘gallops’” (14).²

Femininity flirted with consumption. The most prominent symptoms of tuberculosis included weight loss, chronic coughing, fever, and fatigue.³ These features seeped into the standards of fashion as many wealthy women fancied themselves as fragile and pale heroines. The stereotype was similarly perpetrated by men, who saw the sickly and sallow symptoms as a means of subordinating women. Tuberculosis came to represent both delicacy and desire. Others began mimicking the signs of the disease, aesthetically immortalizing it as the glow and passion of love and the woeful wasting of life. The disease simultaneously summoned the image of innocence and one of advanced age and deterioration.

Sontag noted that the loneliness of tuberculosis patients and the commonplace of sanatoriums were justified because “the TB patient was thought to be helped, even cured, by a change in environment. There was a notion that TB was a wet disease, a disease of humid and dank cities…. Doctors advised travel to high, dry places—the mountains, the desert.”

For some patients, this advice landed them within the cottages of the Wayne Sanatorium. The absence of people in the postcard underscores the lack of emphasis on the humanity involved in providing care. When not invisible, the tuberculosis patients’ pain was trivialized. Afflicted minorities and low-income classes were even more helpless without the luxury of sanatoriums. In time, the disease’s glamor morphed into a correlation with the poor as the sanatoriums themselves morphed into prison-like institutions.

I may never know who lived in those cottages, but I know the cultural legacy of their suffering – from ethereal and elite beauty to isolated and impoverished despair. As I examined the postcard, I found myself engaging in several layers of narrative medicine. Not only was I privy to a historical interview between a local reporter and a doctor, but I pondered the social and artistic portrayals of tuberculosis during the postcard’s era. I was reminded of how modern popular culture sometimes romanticizes mental illness often without regard for the true struggles of victims. Even today, society’s obsession with illness can be its greatest disease.