![]() ![]() Yet, as the best remedies (bleeding, diet, red wine, opium) failed, as his work was savaged by critics and his love was languishing (he could not marry because of the disease), Keats feverishly wrote his greatest poems: Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy. A few years later he watched his brother die of phthisis, and by age 23, he had symptoms of this “hereditary ailment” himself. At 14, he nursed his mother as she died of phthisis. But his life and his works became a metaphor for generations of patients, a metaphor that helped transform the physical disease phthisis” into its spiritual offspring, consumption. One of England’s greatest poets, the medical student John Keats, never wrote specifically about phthisis. “It’s arterial blood…that blood is my death warrant, I must die,” he confides to a friend. He has known many patients who spit such bright blood. In his modest room, a 25-year-old "lapsed" medical student in 1820s Great Britain wakes from a sudden fevered sweat and finds a single drop of blood on the sheet. Now, we must turn to art again to grasp human suffering because scientific knowledge of the disease seems to have displaced our interest in the patient. We studied the works of Petrarcha and Guillaume de Machaut and revisited the terror of Black Death, 700 years ago. ![]() We read the poems of Walt Whitman and taught our children about the soldier's sacrifice. We listened to the molto adagio of Barber’s string quartet (opus 11), and came together at President Roosevelt’s death. The arts (the novel, the play, the poem, the musical composition, the operatic production) have always helped us understand, given us perspective, invoked compassion, and argued a purpose and meaning for life. Perhaps such past images will help fix the gazes of today’s victims, whose faces we do not seem to be able to see. We may need to recall the lives of dying artists and the work they created and let art paint their faces, sculpt their shapes and contours, and compose leitmotivs. To grasp the human suffering perpetrated by tuberculosis, we may need to recall the past when, incurable and incomprehensible, the disease had to be deciphered by metaphors-metaphors that changed as societal views of the disease changed over time. They are “the other.” Maybe they do not even exist. They live in faraway places, come from obscure cultures, speak incomprehensible languages, have disreputable comorbid disease, or exhibit antisocial behavior. How can we grasp such statistics of misery? Reduced to numbers stacked up in columns and cut up in pie charts, tuberculosis patients don’t seem like us. But human suffering is still difficult to quantify. For more than a century, readers have pondered the strange beginning to one of the most haunting poems in the English language, “Requiem.” Who has not wondered how a poet can seem to welcome his own death? Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson died of a disease so poorly understood in his day that over a few decades its preferred name changed three times, from "phthisis" to "consumption" to "tuberculosis.” A century later, we have reliable scientific facts on this "old" poet-killing disease-we know for one that Mycobacterium tuberculosis now infects 1.9 billion people, nearly a third of the world’s population (nearly 2 million deaths each year). ![]()
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