Consumptive Chic: History of
Beauty, Fashion & Disease 2017 by Dr Carolyn Day examined the
connection between fashion and Tuberculosis/TB. The book was beautifully
written and illustrated, but I was angry on women’s behalf while reading. In an era ignorant about TB, the tubercular body came to be
defined culturally. During the late 18th-early C19ths this became romanticised
i.e people actively redefined notions of the otherwise horrible symptoms as ideals of beauty.
Credit: Wellcome Collection
Illustrated with fashion plates and medical images, this was a clear story of the rise of Consumptive Chic which described the strange link between women’s fashions and medical thinking re TB. Thus two belief systems developed in a connected fashion:
1. Women's inherent feminine character/way of life rendered them naturally susceptible to contracting TB.
2. Despite the changing fashions over decades, TB’s symptoms were believed to increase the attractiveness of its victim over time. Once they contracted TB, patients were indeed more likely to die. But they would be increasingly beautiful as they approached death. The emaciated figure and feverish flush of TB victims were positively promoted as a highly desirable appearance. As were the long swan-like necks, large dilated eyes, luxurious eye lashes, white teeth, pale complexions, blue veins and rosy cheeks.
Women focused on their eyes by painting eye liner and eye shadow onto their faces, even though these eye paints contained dangerous mercury (causing kidney damage), radium, lead or antimony oxide (a carcinogen). Women placed poisonous nightshade drops in their eyes, to enlargen their pupils. And they bathed in poisonous arsenic, to make their skin desirably pale. The poison vermillion was worn on the lips as a lush red tint. How brutal, then, that medical writers knew that the fashionable way of life of many women actually harmed them.
What would inspire largely educated classes to respond to illness through the channels of fashion? Why would people try to glamorise the symptoms of a deadly disease?? Day showed that consumption was seen to confer beauty on its victim. Yes it was a disease, but one that would become a positive event in women’s lives.
The Victorian corset was a heavy
duty clothing apparatus, capable of constricting a woman's waist down to a tiny
17”; this and an hourglass
figure were all the rage in the C19th. Dresses were designed to
feature the bony wing-like shoulder blades of the consumptive back,
emphasising an emaciated frame. Additionally, diaphanous dresses and sandals exposed women to
cold weather.
The coughing, emaciation, endless
diarrhoea, fever and coughing of phlegm and blood became both a sign of beauty
and also a fashionable disease. As obscene as it seems now, TB was depicted
as an easy and beautiful way to fade into death. It was neither!!
Day noted the disease’s connections to the Romantic poets and to scholars in the early C19th. Literary influence
was important for educated women; most Romantic writers, artists and composers
with TB created a myth that consumption drove male artistic genius. The link
coincided with the ideologies of Romanticism, a philosophical movement that
opposed the Enlightenment through its emphasis on emotion and imagination. These men were the best, most intelligent & brightest members of society. Lord Byron (1788-1824), the most notorious of the
Romantic poets, noted that his TB affliction caused ladies to look at him with
heartbreak. The poet John Keats (1795-1821) embodied an
example of the refined tubercular artistic genius, doomed to a very early
death. He was a body too delicate to endure earthly life, but one whose
intellect indelibly imprinted on culture.
And artistic
women too. The link between TB and ideal femininity was played up
by Alexandre Dumas fils whose novel La Dame aux Camélias
(1848) presented redemption for immorality via the suffering of TB. The
consumptive model Elizabeth Siddal, the drowned Ophelia in John
Everett Millais’ pre-Raphaelite painting of 1851, became an icon for her
generation.
Furman News, 1888
Could the different reactions to TB, the glamorisation of the illness for upper class women Vs the bleak experience of TB in impoverished Victorian communities, be there to maintain class order in Britain? Perhaps fashion-setters elevated TB as an elegant form of suffering for the upper classes, specifically to create a psychological distance from the unsavoury realities of lower-class disease? No wonder TB victims from the British upper classes were lauded while poor victims were stigmatised.
My blog-partner-doctor wanted to know why other diseases like cholera did not have the same cultural impact? Because, Day said, infectious diseases followed an epidemic pattern. First they increased very quickly; then they slowly faded in intensity and incidence. The course of TB was less flashy than other contagious illnesses, but it still followed a ve ry slow epidemic cycle of infection.
A much better understanding of TB came in 1882 when germ theory was described by Louis Pasteur. In that year Robert Koch announced he'd discovered and isolated the microscopic bacteria that cause the disease. Koch’s discovery helped convince public health experts that TB was contagious. And that the victim’s sparkling or dilated eyes, rosy cheeks and red lips were caused by frequent low-grade fever
Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, c1852, Tate
Preventing the spread of TB led to
some of the first large-scale public health campaigns. Doctors began to define
long, trailing skirts as causes of disease because they swept up germs from the
street. Corsets were also believed to exacerbate TB by limiting movement
of the lungs and blood circulation. And doctors began prescribing
sunbathing as a treatment for TB. Eventually TB was viewed as a
pernicious biological force requiring control. The weak and susceptible female
gave way to a model of health and strength.
NB Emily Mullin How Tuberculosis Shaped Victorian Fashion
The tubercular model Elizabeth Siddal became an icon for her generation.