Tuberculosis

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Checkov

Chekhov was diagnosed with the disease in 1897 at the age of thirty-seven, but knew that he was sick long before any doctor told him so (Koteliansky xvi).  After all, Chekhov was himself a practicing Russian physician before turning full time to the world of writing fiction and plays.  Chekhov might actually lend some credit to the idea that one was burning from passion when afflicted with the disease as he wrote the four plays he is most famous, and most heralded for, at the end of his life as he was withering away from the disease.  However, Chekhov did not go the same route as other 'inspired' poets and authors who shared his consumptive affliction.

 

            Anton Chekhov rarely mentioned his own disease.  In correspondence to Olga Knipper, the woman who would become his wife, he rarely mentions the disease.  He speaks of it with not much more force or feeling than if he were relaying particularly boring details regarding the weather or pesky neighbors.  This avoidance of the disease's name in his letters to loved ones is mirrored extensively in his fiction and plays.  In his last four plays, written after he was formally diagnosed as positive for Tuberculosis, Chekhov does not once mention the disease by name, though several of the plays characters are suffering from illnesses that look profoundly like Tuberculosis.  Thomas Dormandy would argue that Chekhov did not name the disease in these plays simply because "The tuberculous in real life rarely referred to their illness to outsiders, hardly ever by name"(189).  While this certainly may hold a grain of truth, it is of this researcher's opinion that there is more to Chekhov's omission than that.  Anton Chekhov neglected to name 'Tuberculosis' as the disease in his final four plays not because Tuberculosis infected patients rarely spoke of their infection, but rather, because it would have undermined his ideals and goals as an author.

MLA Citation:
"The Impact of Tuberculosis on the Work of Anton Chekhov." 123HelpMe.com. 10 Nov 2007
    <http://www.123HelpMe.com/view.asp?id=12037>.

Frank Ryan (the forgotton plague)

Nowhere in these ancient communities of the Eurasian land mass, where it is so common and feared, is there a record of its beginning. Throughout history, it had always been there, a familiar evil, yet forever changing, formless, unknowable. Where other epidemics might last weeks or months, where even the bubonic plague would be marked forever afterwards by the year it reigned, the epidemics of tuberculosis would last whole centuries and even multiples of centuries. Tuberculosis rose slowly, silently, seeping into homes of millions, like an ageless miasma. And once arrived, it never went away again. Year after year, century after century, it tightened its relentless hold, worsening whenever war or famine reduced the peoples' resistance, infecting virtually everybody, inexplicably sparing some while destroying others, bringing the young down onto their sickbeds, where the flesh slowly fell from their bones and they were consumed in the years-long fever, their minds brilliantly alert until, in apocalyptic numbers, they died, like the fallen leaves of a dreadful and premature autumn.

  The Forgotten Plague:

How the War against Tuberculosis was Won - and Lost

Frank Ryan, 1992

excerpt from tuberculosistextbook.com/ Posted with the kind permission of Viviana Ritacco MD, PhD and her collegues who are very generous with their efforts, time and work.

Atypical TB