Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease

Clark Lawlor. Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. viii + 243 pp. $65.00 (ISBN-10: 0-230-02003-8; ISBN-13: 978-0-230-02003-0).

Consumption and Literature fulfills what its title promises. This is an interdisciplinary study of medical and literary history, not just the history of a motif in literature. In his introduction Lawlor gives a considered account of the relationship between the body and language and between medicine and literature. Consumption, he makes clear, is not a biologically fixed phenomenon or the invention of discourse. Instead it "has certain biological patterns that impose themselves on, and give rise to, cultural meanings of the disease" (p. 4), meanings that in turn shape the way it is experienced in real life. Medical, literary, and other writers have influenced one another in their understanding of the illness.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, a gulf seemed to arise between fiction and fact (p. 3): consumption came to be seen in the literary and popular consciousness as a romantic disease, its painful and ugly biological aspects elided. Lawlor takes...