Tillys Shelf | Belated BB9: TB and the Victorians @tillysshelf | Uploaded October 2019 | Updated October 2024, 13 hours ago.
Filmed this on Thursday as usual, but my phone decided to split the file into 6 and delete the ending. So I've joined the chunks together, what would have been the conclusion is below.
Just to reiterate, I am NOT an expert on TB and I am NOT an expert on the Victorians. However, it was pretty fun looking into this and I hope you find it interesting too. I broadly broke it up into 3 areas:
- Early 19th century: TB/phthisis/consumption as a romantic, intellectual disease
- 1850s onward: the emergence of Public Health and TB as a disease of industrialisation and urbanisation, treated with sanatoria
- From 1882: the biological understanding of TB as an infectious, bacterial disease
The conclusion to the video mentioned further improvements in tackling TB including Tuberculin testing of cows for bovine TB (this was a failed vaccine that turned out to be most useful for revealing latent - Tuberculin testing is used to this day as part of TB screening), and increasing sales of soap across the latter part of the Victorian era as understandings of the importance of cleanliness improved. However, the public perception of TB seemed to continue to deteriorate with TB being associated with negative social behaviours and the undeserving poor. Whereas in the 1850s portrayals of people like Bessy Higgins suggested a social obligation to improve conditions to reduce the presence of the disease, the obligation was now thrown onto those living with TB avoid contaminating their environment. I didn't find a literary example for this period.
There was no truly effective treatment for TB until the widespread use of antibiotics in the 1950s. These, combined with use of the BCG vaccine (though not entirely effective) significantly reduced TB in the UK over the course of the 20th century, to the point where we now think of it as a Victorian disease. Unfortunately this is not the case and we are seeing increasing proportions of TB that are resistant to antibiotic treatments (MDR and XDR TB). TB continues to be a disease that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable in society both here and worldwide, causing 10 million people to fall ill in 2018 despite multiple global projects aiming to eliminate the disease.
Thank you for watching (and reading), and happy Victober!
Books and authors mentioned:
Spitting Blood by Helen Bynum (2012)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
North and south by Elizabeth Gaskell (1853) (the medical name for "fluff on the lung" is Byssinosis)
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens (1848)
John Keats
William Wordsworth
Elizabeth Siddal (thumbnail is her as Beata Beatrix by Rossetti, 1870)
Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag (1978) - I haven't actually reads this though it looks interesting!
Carolyn Day quoted in hyperallergic.com/415421/consumptive-chic-a-history-of-beaty-fashion-disease
Katherine Byrne quoted in ncgsjournal.com/issue92/New%20PDFs/NCGS%20Journal%20Issue%209.2%20-%20Revisiting%20Tuberculosis%20in%20Victorian%20Literature%20and%20Culture%20-%20Louise%20Penner%20.pdf
Barnes Stevenson in victorianweb.org/authors/gaskell/n_s5.html
Thanks again to the hosts of Victober, Katy from Books and Things, Kate Howe, Lucy the Reader and Ange from Beyond the Pages.
Filmed this on Thursday as usual, but my phone decided to split the file into 6 and delete the ending. So I've joined the chunks together, what would have been the conclusion is below.
Just to reiterate, I am NOT an expert on TB and I am NOT an expert on the Victorians. However, it was pretty fun looking into this and I hope you find it interesting too. I broadly broke it up into 3 areas:
- Early 19th century: TB/phthisis/consumption as a romantic, intellectual disease
- 1850s onward: the emergence of Public Health and TB as a disease of industrialisation and urbanisation, treated with sanatoria
- From 1882: the biological understanding of TB as an infectious, bacterial disease
The conclusion to the video mentioned further improvements in tackling TB including Tuberculin testing of cows for bovine TB (this was a failed vaccine that turned out to be most useful for revealing latent - Tuberculin testing is used to this day as part of TB screening), and increasing sales of soap across the latter part of the Victorian era as understandings of the importance of cleanliness improved. However, the public perception of TB seemed to continue to deteriorate with TB being associated with negative social behaviours and the undeserving poor. Whereas in the 1850s portrayals of people like Bessy Higgins suggested a social obligation to improve conditions to reduce the presence of the disease, the obligation was now thrown onto those living with TB avoid contaminating their environment. I didn't find a literary example for this period.
There was no truly effective treatment for TB until the widespread use of antibiotics in the 1950s. These, combined with use of the BCG vaccine (though not entirely effective) significantly reduced TB in the UK over the course of the 20th century, to the point where we now think of it as a Victorian disease. Unfortunately this is not the case and we are seeing increasing proportions of TB that are resistant to antibiotic treatments (MDR and XDR TB). TB continues to be a disease that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable in society both here and worldwide, causing 10 million people to fall ill in 2018 despite multiple global projects aiming to eliminate the disease.
Thank you for watching (and reading), and happy Victober!
Books and authors mentioned:
Spitting Blood by Helen Bynum (2012)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
North and south by Elizabeth Gaskell (1853) (the medical name for "fluff on the lung" is Byssinosis)
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens (1848)
John Keats
William Wordsworth
Elizabeth Siddal (thumbnail is her as Beata Beatrix by Rossetti, 1870)
Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag (1978) - I haven't actually reads this though it looks interesting!
Carolyn Day quoted in hyperallergic.com/415421/consumptive-chic-a-history-of-beaty-fashion-disease
Katherine Byrne quoted in ncgsjournal.com/issue92/New%20PDFs/NCGS%20Journal%20Issue%209.2%20-%20Revisiting%20Tuberculosis%20in%20Victorian%20Literature%20and%20Culture%20-%20Louise%20Penner%20.pdf
Barnes Stevenson in victorianweb.org/authors/gaskell/n_s5.html
Thanks again to the hosts of Victober, Katy from Books and Things, Kate Howe, Lucy the Reader and Ange from Beyond the Pages.
