Lunchtime Lecture: Fashioning the Consumptive Chic: Beauty and Disease in early Victorian England

Join Dr. Carolyn Day as she discusses the connections between fashion and tuberculosis in the early Victorian period, when clothing was seen by the medical profession as a causative agent of disease, at the same time that the ravages of tuberculosis were highlighted by beauty practices and imitated by the prevailing fashions.

A chasm often exists between the gruesome biological symptoms of diseases and the comparatively positive representations employed as part of the strategies for experiencing them. This dichotomy is particularly evident in the representations of consumption (tuberculosis) in the early nineteenth century. During this period, there was a tubercular moment in which cultural ideas about beauty increasingly intertwined with the disease process to allow for the ravages of consumption to be presented in an aesthetically pleasing light. By the nineteenth century, the delicate constitution of the female provided an excellent basis for creating a metaphor of tubercular beauty and there was a dynamic interaction between the notions of beauty, disease and the feminine ideal.

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