Tea at Trianon: Romanticizing Death: Art in the Age of Tuberculosis

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Romanticizing Death: Art in the Age of Tuberculosis

From The Collector:

Tuberculosis is a highly contagious disease that is transmitted from microscopic droplets released in the air. It prompts symptoms including pale skin, a high temperature, and the tell-tale sign of coughing up blood. From Hippocrates through to the nineteenth century, the disease was also known as phthisis and consumption. These are terms derived from their Greek and Latin origins, with the former meaning “to waste away.” And ‘waste away’ its sufferers do: without medical intervention tuberculosis is routinely fatal.
It acts by first affecting the air passages of the lungs known as pulmonary alveoli where the bacterium replicates. This causes the symptoms such as weight-loss (cachexia) and labored breathing (dyspnea) to manifest, which weaken the patient and cause their gradual deterioration. Despite the fact that it can now be managed by antibiotics, tuberculosis remains to this date a highly dangerous disease and is listed as the tenth leading cause of death worldwide.
This disease has been present and documented since antiquity but peaked in Western Europe in the early modern period. By the nineteenth century, tuberculosis had become an epidemic in Europe. Between the years of 1851 and 1910 in England and Wales alone, a staggering four million died from tuberculosis, with more than one third of those aged between 15 to 34, and half between 20 to 24. This earned the disease another apt title: “the robber of youth.”

It was not until 1944, when streptomycin, the first antibiotic drug for the disease was founded that it could be managed. This was made possible by the discoveries made in earlier centuries by one of the main founders of modern bacteriology, Robert Koch (1843 – 1910), who in 1882 had successfully discovered and isolated the tubercle bacillus organism that caused the disease. (Read more.)