Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Ligeia

  • Poe’s consumptive paradox

    Gregory Rutecki Cleveland, Ohio, United States   Tuberculosis may have killed more people than any pathogen in history1 leaving an array of terrible stigmata whenever it extinguished life. The essential image of tuberculosis in the eighteenth century was that of foul decay.2 Morgagni vividly described the road to a consumptive death as, “(she) threw up…