Tag: Tuberculosis
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“Breath of life you’ll be to me”—The portrayal of tuberculosis in the opera La Traviata
Judith WagnerMunich, Germany The white half-round of the stage is illuminated with an eerie blue light. The only prop is a large clock on the right-hand side. A dark figure is seated beside it. The door on the left opens and the heroine—clad all in red—enters the stage. Strings accompany her appearance with a low…
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Chopin’s heart
Wilfred ArnoldKansas, United States In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birthday Frédéric Chopin was born near Warsaw, Poland in 1810. From 1831 he lived mostly in France, where he achieved international acclaim for his music despite a debilitating and life-shortening illness. He first began to cough up blood in 1835, and this eventually…
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Heartache and complicated grief
Laurie Elise GordonNew York, New York, United States “To whom shall I tell this heartache?” – Old Russian song Medicine is haunted by grief. In tense silences we may sense the specter. Grieving is a normal developmental process, but in some it gets interrupted. A grieving patient calls upon the physician’s most highly attuned empathy.…
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René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec and the stethoscope
Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States What constitutes a high-tech instrument? Obviously, in the field of medicine, one that has been developed to improve evaluation of a given condition and lead to a more specific diagnosis. In the early 19th century, there was little that could be considered high-tech in medicine in regard to instrumentation.…
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Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: About a whistling pneumothorax and pulmonary tuberculosis
Peter KorstenGöttingen, Germany Originally intended as a novella, Thomas Mann’s (1875–1955) multilayered novel The Magic Mountain documents in fine detail the methods used to treat lung diseases and especially pulmonary tuberculosis at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, who intended to spend only three weeks in the sanatorium in the Swiss mountains…
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Art, Cristobal Rojas, and tuberculosis: A Latin American cultural experience
Maria S. LandaetaAldo L. SchenoneGregory W. Rutecki Tuberculosis, the “captain of all these men of death,” has devastated diverse societies for thousands of years. How are experiences related to this unforgiving and seemingly insatiable disease made unique by their cultural contexts? The visual arts provide a record of this disease as it relates to specific…
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Abbott Handerson Thayer’s art and fin de siècle American culture
Gregory RuteckiCleveland, Ohio, United States Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849–1921) straddled the fin de siècle, and with his brush preserved an American counterculture for posterity. His variegated oeuvre reflects substantive reflections of his period’s medical and religious culture, as well as the earliest American naturalism. His was a momentous time as science unfolded the implications of…
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Therapeutic beauty
Elizabeth LeeCarlisle, Pennsylvania, United States A longer version of this article was published in American Art, Volume 18, Number 3. © 2004 by The University of Chicago Press. In the late 1880s, the painter Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921) and his family began summering in rural Dublin, New Hampshire, near his childhood home in Keene, where…
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Lights and shadows and vitamin D
Adriano AngelucciL’Aquila, Italy In his paintings, Edward Hopper shows us a reality that is the result of a rational contrast between lights and shadows. The summer sun illuminates the natural landscapes but cannot penetrate through the large windows of the buildings, which inside look like dark boxes. The characters are often light seekers, but they…