‘Halfe Dead: and rotten at the Coare: my Lord!’: Fashionable and Unfashionable Consumption, from Early Modern to Enlightenment

It is well known that consumption is a fashionable disease: Susan Sontag contrasted it with cancer, and called it a disease of the self, a disease that expressed something about the personality of the sufferer. Historians and literary critics have written at length about consumption’s social and cultural cachet in various domains: religion, spirituality, the good death, secular love melancholy, female beauty, male genius, and the various connections between them. Consumption has been the subject of much literary production, and much of it stresses consumption’s potential benefits to the sufferer. However, not all strands of consumptive imagery are positive, and not all lend themselves to the apparently dominant artistic representations of the condition.