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.
It's heartbreaking to think that women's suffering was once romanticised into fashion, where death was dressed up as beauty, and poison as allure. I am reminded of my days in medical school, when tuberculosis invariably featured among the differential diagnoses for nearly every clinical sign presented during examinations.
ReplyDeleteroentare
DeleteTB was hideous, as you know, and men got it more often than women. Yet it was never romanticism for males. So when women died from TB more often than men, I can see why :(
Im unsurprised. Any suffering in the lower classes can be blamed on the victim.
ReplyDeleteFaced with a deadly disease, the only approach which can help the better off to feel in control is to glamorise it. Heroin chic comes to mind
kylie
DeleteTB was far more frequent in the poorer working classes because family members had to share beds and had inadequate food supplies. But those women were ignored.. not romanticised at all.
At its peak, TB caused an estimated a quarter to a third of all deaths in Europe. Of the six Bronte siblings, five would die of TB between 1825 and 1849, with only Charlotte avoiding the infection.
ReplyDeleteAverage Scientist
Deletemany thanks. I imagine that TB peaked at that time in Britain, India etc because the industrial revolution was booming, forcing workers to spend endless hours in horrible conditions.
But what happened to the very literate Bronte siblings? Patrick Bronte sent four of his daughters: Maria, Elizabeth, Emily and Charlotte to the Clergy Daughter’s School at Cowan Bridge. In 1825 Maria and Elizabeth got ill from the dampness and terrible living conditions there and died of TB at the school (https://ilab.org/fr/article/the-deaths-of-the-bronte-family)
Aside from modern gay male fashion designers, I think for once men are not to blame for what was perceived as beauty in women who were consumptive. Women are far more consumed with female beauty than men have ever been. For men, there could be a initial wow factor when they see a beautifully turned out woman, but their thoughts quickly go to what lies below the frippery. As has been said before, women dress for women's approval, rather than men's.
ReplyDeleteQuite an interesting post, and as is your usual, not something I knew about.
Andrew
DeleteWomen really have always been more consumed with female beauty than men, yes. But men had many saleable qualities eg physical strength, family inheritance, steady income, fascinating career, handsome face, sporting talent etc. What did women have, other than a beautiful face and body?
So when TB struck, I don't think they deliberately let women die... but I do think they maximised the women's beauty as long as they possibly could.
Extraordinary!
ReplyDeleteIn an entirely different way, some women today are being persuaded into unnecessary surgery in order to fulfil a stylised view of 'beauty' perpetuated by the entertainment business.
jabblog
Deletethe difference being that women today have botox inserted and fake breast operations because of vigorous advertising from cosmetic surgeons, programmes like Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, their own fantasies from teen years etc. Not because of pressure from their husbands.
With TB, however, fragility and sexual attractiveness were encouraged by husbands and families in the 19th century :(
How the hell could anyone think an emaciated looking woman looked good , also I have always thought the corset was more a torture device then a fashion device
ReplyDeleteJo-Anne
Deletevery true, especially since pale, skinny and weak men would never have been considered attractive. Same disease... different responses.
With hindsight and modern knowledge we can easily see the mistakes made in the past, yet modern women still fall victim to fads such as botoxed lips, over-sized breasts and buttocks and lately, cheek fillers to show off prominent cheekbones. Why do they all want to look exactly the same like this? Be an individual! Be different!
ReplyDeleteRiver
DeleteAnyone intelligent woman who has ever seen Botched on tv will understand that bizarre cosmetic work leads to 1] no improvements whatsover, 2] minor difficulties or 3] total tragedies. If the anatomical problem was dysfunctional (eg cleft palate or facial trauma) and not cosmetic (larger breasts), then only a proper surgeon can operate.
I like the Millais painting, but I don't see why Elizabeth Siddal became an icon for her generation. I assume she died of TB as a young woman, but that was tragic, not iconic.
ReplyDeleteDeb
DeleteMillais painted Ophelia who had been mad when she drowned according to Shakespeare. He used Elizabeth Siddal as his model who was already sick when Ophelia was painted in 1852, but perhaps Millais liked the young woman's fragile look. I say that because in the painting of Ophelia drowning, the model looked floaty and saintly.
Siddal died in 1862, during her second year of marriage to Rossetti - tragically she was only 32. So it seems it was her brief, depressed perhaps suicidal life that made her so famous AFTER her death.
Oh my, how could Dr Carolyn Day write this, shocking just reading it, Hels. However, the symptoms are mentioned.
ReplyDeleteI remember having to have an Xray every year ending in 1976 If I recall.
Margaret,
Deletewas the book inaccurate? or horrendously frightening about what might have happened to our great grandparents?
It still scares me now that the first step in a cure discovering the cause of TB by Robert Koch was as recently as 1882. Even worse the antituberculosis benefit of certain antibiotics weren't discovered until the late 1940s and 1950s.
Hi Helen! It's scary to think that people idealized a disease like tuberculosis.
ReplyDeleteHelen, happy beginning of July!
Irina
DeleteVery scary. And I am not sure how nations are protecting their women, even now. TB is largely under control but there are do many other parts of life that we need to worry about - clothing restrictions, forced childhood marriages, access to high school and university education etc etc. Even superannuation is limited to all men and single women in some countries.
I didn't know this, and it's a shame about those poor women. I wonder if women were more likely to be sick, or if men weren't found more handsome as the disease progressed. TB is a terrible disease, and anyone really sick really couldn't be all that beautiful. Happy July Hels.
ReplyDeleteErika
Deleteonce the TB sanatoria opened up from the 1850s and onwards, doctors advised their patients to rest lying on verandas in the sunshine, eat healthily and exercise in the fresh air. All this had to be done away from the crowded, dirty cities, and lasted for approximately a year, so was presumably available only to families with money.
I have seen episodes of Botched and it's horrifying.
ReplyDeleteRiver
DeleteI have watched it also. Drs Terry Dubrow and Paul Nassif are both plastic surgeons are well qualified for the cases that turn up in their programme, but some of the stupid patients have been to eye makeup artists and massage therapists for the first surgical improvements.
You have to wonder about the motivation of some of the patients when asking for more and more surgery. I have seen perfectly normal patients asking to have their buttocks redesigned, to be as close to Kim Karsashian as possible
It's hard to believe that TB was romanticised and women sufferers were looking beautiful. I bet they didn't feel beautiful when coughing madly. An interesting way to cope with an infectious disease. My mum nursed TB patients bacck in the 50's and 60's.
ReplyDeletediane
DeleteDid you mother ever tell you about her nursing experience? Was she depressed as a result?
I have a personal connection to TB also. My paternal grandmother got TB before Australia had Isoniazid in 1952. She was taken to a quality sanitorium in the moutains outside Melbourne, but her husband and 6 children were never allowed to visit, probably for good reason. So my dad and all the young siblings for fostered out to aunts and uncles. They didn't even remember what their mother looked like :(
Bom dia e uma excelente quinta-feira. Infelizmente muitas mulheres ainda sofrem até hoje, pelo padrão de moda atual.
ReplyDeleteLuiz
Deletealas that is totally true, and not just in fashion standards :( But nothing will change until we find out where the pressures are coming from and we educate women to look after their own well being.
Very interesting read hels.
ReplyDeleteI was reminded that Violetta in La Traviata dies in tragedy of TB.
As for romanticism of the esthetic, it might be a psychological reaction or response to horrors of pandemics. While TB might be romanticised, AIDs victims were extremely stigmatised. The suffering also may have become linked to an artistic expression (think: Freddie Mercury).
I was also thinking of covid-19 and, in my view the bizarre and ghoulish, the fashion of having designs and fashion labels on covid masks.
Liam.
"... an artistic expression of defiance" ... I meant to say!!
DeleteLiam
Deleteperfect example! Violetta gave clear evidence of her TB even though she bounced around at first as if she was healthy. Her character died aged 23. And look at the date La traviata was first staged - 1853!
And look at John Keats who died of TB in 1821, tragically aged 25. Yet he didn't deny and glorify his pain; in fact his poetry and letters revealed his severe melancholy and existential dread.
Liam
DeleteFreddie Mercury was a strong 40s-something when passed away from an AIDS-caused condition. But he must have been ashamed of AIDS because he hadn't told _anyone_ ... even when he went blind, lost most of his weight and suffered pain.
TB would have been too embarrassing to discuss, and probably AIDS was also.
and very recently it was Heroin Chic. Honestly women really confound me . we inject, insert , cut off, pull tight etc our bodies and yet we aspire to feminism . Its just nuts.
ReplyDeletemem
DeleteI am not remotely interested in cosmetic surgery for myself or anyone I know. But this morning I read in the news the long term consequences for women who recarved their noses, lips, cheeks, eye and chin when they were teens or 20s. They are so damaged decades later that they never leave the home :(