Line #86 Main/VictorianNovelDisease


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6	->''"Romantic opera usually deals with the subject of some romance which never comes off owing to the untimely demise of the prima donna through one of four causes: murder, suicide, madness or TB."''
7	-->-- '''Creator/AnnaRussell'''
8
9	If you're the star of a [[UsefulNotes/VictorianBritain Victorian Novel]] or an opera which could have been adapted from one, you're preferably [[HairOfGoldHeartOfGold blonde]] and [[InnocentBlueEyes blue-eyed]], [[PurpleProse with an alabaster brow and feet light as the entrance of Spring]]. So [[IncorruptiblePurePureness pure]] are your thoughts that you faint at even the ''sight'' of blood, and have little stomach for gory tales.
10
11	You're also dying of a disease which will probably be called "consumption" if it isn't TheDiseaseThatShallNotBeNamed. Fortunately, this ailment has no ill effects other than adding a [[IncurableCoughOfDeath poignant cough to the appropriate sentences]], and making your eyes ''even brighter'', your skin ''even paler'', and your complexion ''even more'' striking. In operas, it won't prevent you from singing at least one aria in your death scene.[[note]]What was actually called "consumption" in the Victorian era is known as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis tuberculosis]] today, and its RealLife effects are not nearly as glamorous as Victorian Novel Disease makes them out to be.[[/note]]
12
13	Standards of beauty are a funny thing. When the lower class is poor and thin and haggard looking, the nobility commissions portraits depicting themselves as Rubenesque, with rosy cheeks and dimpled arms, to show off their indulgent dining habits as a way of immortalizing their wealth. However, when the economy stabilizes and the poor are able to be plump and rosy-cheeked, then the standard of beauty... ''shrinks.'' Women become diminutive, frail, wan little things, and prone to {{fainting}} spells and headaches. Rather like Creator/DrSeuss' star-bellied Sneetches, [[SlobsVersusSnobs the "haves" set as the height of desirability whatever quality the "have-nots" cannot achieve.]]
14
15	Alternatively, if you experience something extremely harrowing or frightening, you can expect to fall into a subtype of [=VND=], where you might ‘faint from exertion’ then spend several months in bed beset by a mysterious half-physiological, half-psychological conundrum of a condition; for more information on this particular subtype of [=VND=] see BrainFever.
16
17	When suffering from Victorian Novel Disease, you can expect to meet plenty of people OopNorth or [[FunetikAksent from Zummer]][[UsefulNotes/TheWestCountry zet]], who will probably end up teaching you a thing or two about class, life in the mills or in the hills (or both), and how to love someone for real, amongst numerous other lessons. That is when they ''aren't dying of [=VND=] themselves''.
18
19	The epitome of the fragile, delicate woman is that she is DelicateAndSickly -- AlwaysFemale, [[NatureAdoresAVirgin always innocent]] [[ChasteHero and pure]], almost always young[[note]](usually in her teens or twenties, someone you wouldn't ''expect'' to be terminally ill)[[/note]], always dying of some disease that is very slow at actually killing her. As she lies enthroned in her beautiful sickroom, everyone around her spends countless hours musing poignantly on her death and/or trying to surround her with the things she loved most in life. Her proximity to the eternal gives her immense wisdom and insight, and she will be a never-ending source of advice and comfort to her caretakers, to the point where it's hard to tell who is comforting whom. And, of course, since WomenAreDelicate, no aspect of her disease (whatever it may be, [[TheDiseaseThatShallNotBeNamed if it's named at all]]) is "[[{{Squick}} icky]]" in any way, even if it would be total BodyHorror in RealLife: she will never suffer from vomiting or diarrhea, never sweat more than a light glisten despite possibly running a fever, never develop any [[BeautyIsNeverTarnished unsightly]] skin rashes, lesions, or lumps, and any [[BloodFromTheMouth blood or mucus she coughs up]] will always land delicately (and unseen) in her lace handkerchief. Even when her weakness becomes so great that she can barely move, [[InspirationallyDisadvantaged she will never succumb to anger, despair, sorrow, regret, sadness, or frustration]]. When at last she slips the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God, those around her (one of them likely [[DiedInYourArmsTonight holding her frail form in his arms]]) will smile through their tears and [[TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth rejoice that her pure soul has taken its flight from this dirty world]]. [[{{Glurge}} Gag]].
20
21	In modern times, a virulent strain has developed as the SoapOperaDisease. The LittlestCancerPatient is usually more upbeat about their [[YourDaysAreNumbered impending death]]. A common treatment for this is HealthyCountryAir or a trip to a HealingSpring. Contrast DangerousDrowsiness, where someone ''does'' get tired, and it's serious. Dangerous Drowsiness can also affect both sexes.
22
23	----
24	!!Examples
25
26	[[foldercontrol]]
27
28	[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
29	* Parodied and subverted in ''Manga/CountCain'', wherein several vain girls are tricked into ingesting various parasites to get that lovely white pallor.
30	* Rin's mother in ''Kodomo no Jikan''. Though they actually stated she had lung cancer.
31	* Takiko Okuda in ''Manga/FushigiYuugiGenbuKaiden''. She contracted tuberculosis, as a result of taking care of her mother (who had the disease and died of it at the beginning of the story), before she entered the book. Unlike most examples of this trope, [[spoiler: she does not die of her tuberculosis, but becomes the victim of a MurderSuicide by her father (who wanted [[MercyKill to spare her more suffering]]).]]
32	* Sarah Frances Russell from ''Manga/{{Lady}}'' (set in 1920s England). Blonde-haired and blue-eyed? Check. Prone to {{fainting}}? Check. So ill that she can barely walk outside and needs constant supervision? Check.
33	* ''Manga/TheRoseOfVersailles'' strikes three different characters with tuberculosis:
34	** The first is Louis Joseph, the Dauphine of France. In spite of being male he's the only one who plays it straight... And may have infected the other two, given their close contact with him during his illness.
35	** The second is Oscar, who discovers her condition in the lead-up to the French Revolution. This sudden reminder of her mortality may have played a part in her actions, that culminated in leading the French Guard in joining the Parisians as they assaulted the Bastille... And being shot and killed by the defenders as she was commanding the artillery.
36	** The final one is Marie Antoinette, Louis Joseph's mother, who discovers her illness during her imprisonment and trial. It doesn't stop her from putting in his place the one man depraved enough to accuse her of ''incest'' with her other son, or from [[FaceDeathWithDignity showing everyone how the Queen of France faces the guillotine]].
37	[[/folder]]
38
39	[[folder:Comic Books]]
40	* ''Franchise/WonderWoman'' [[ComicBook/WonderWoman1942 Vol 1]]: Margo Vandergilt's illness is never named and she is pale, weak enough that she needs leg braces in order to walk, and pretty; all of which make her an appealing target to a blackmail gang that decides to operate out of the young widow's mansion.
41	[[/folder]]
42
43	[[folder:Fan Works]]
44	* A staple of {{Creator/Sidhemail}}'s work, especially ''I Am Stretched on Your Grave''.
45	[[/folder]]
46
47	[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
48	* 1970 weeper ''Film/LoveStory'' offers an infamous example in Ali [=McGraw=], whose terminal illness just makes her prettier.
49	* In ''Film/SherlockHolmesAGameOfShadows'', [[spoiler:Irene]] dies from "a rare form of tuberculosis", due to Moriarty poisoning her tea.
50	* ''Film/DarkVictory'' offers a peculiar example. This trope is initially averted, as Creator/BetteDavis suffers from relatively accurate symptoms of brain cancer -- dizziness, headaches, blurred vision, numbness. However, it's played utterly straight after her brain surgery, which fails to cure her but somehow leaves her with a form of brain cancer that has her feeling healthy and vigorous and looking lovely until an attack of blindness that signifies her death is mere hours away.
51	* Lampshaded in ''Film/HeavenlyCreatures.'' Juliet had tuberculosis as a child and suffers a relapse as a teen, but is aware enough of this trope to note, "All the best people have bad chests and bone diseases. It's all frightfully romantic."
52	* In the 1970s, a series of European films - one of which was ''The Last Snows of Spring'' - played with this trope. The afflicted were always children or young teens, who run around quite happily and healthily, notwithstanding the occasional DeadlyNosebleed or fainting fit, before dying prettily in a parent's arms. In one case, the dying teenage boy even managed to complete a swimming race before dropping dead.
53	* In ''Film/{{Cinderella 2015}}'', Ella's mother is seemingly dying of an illness but still looks beautiful, if a little thin. It may be justified by being cancer, which before chemotherapy was less disfiguring unless visible tumors were involved, but also inevitably fatal in the era in which the film is ostensibly set.
54	* ''Film/MoulinRouge'' is based on ''Literature/TheLadyOfTheCamellias''. [[spoiler:Satine]] develops a fatal case of consumption and dies at the end of the film, but not before singing her last song.
55	* In 1932 tearjerker romance ''Film/OneWayPassage'', Joan is dying of--well, something, something that apparently makes any exertion dangerous, and will kill her in a matter of weeks, although she still looks not just healthy but gorgeous. A throwaway reference to a sanitarium vaguely implies that it's tuberculosis, but she doesn't cough once, although she does faint a couple of times.
56	* Shown in the [[StylisticSuck cheesy historical romance novel]] that Joan Wilder is writing at the start of ''Film/TheJewelOfTheNile''. The handsome hero and the beautiful heroine are on a sinking ship being attacked by pirates. There's only room in the lifeboat for one more person, so one of them has to make a HeroicSacrifice.
57	-->'''Heroine:''' You take it, my love.
58	-->'''Hero:''' Never! Those maggots will not have you.
59	-->'''Heroine:''' They will not have me for long. I have consumption and will be dead before the year is out.
60	-->'''Hero:''' You were gonna marry me with consumption? Why didn't you tell me?
61	-->'''Heroine:''' I didn't want to spoil things.
62	* In ''[[Film/WutheringHeights1939 Wuthering Heights (1939)]]'', Cathy dies romantically [[DiedInYourArmsTonight in Heathcliff’s arms]] of a disease that the doctor can’t identify: the main symptoms are fever and inflammation of the lungs, but the doctor thinks it all comes down to [[DeathByDespair “the will to die.”]] This is a LighterAndSofter change from the novel, where her despair triggers a brutal BrainFever, leading to her death in premature [[DeathByChildbirth childbirth.]]
63	[[/folder]]
64
65	[[folder:Literature]]
66	* Marguerite aka ''Literature/TheLadyOfTheCamellias'' (from the novel by Creator/AlexandreDumasFils) is dying of a Victorian Novel Disease. Because nothing, not even the deterioration of one's lungs, should stand in the way of one's career as a successful courtesan!
67	* In ''[[Literature/AnneOfGreenGables Anne of the Island]]'', Anne's childhood playmate [[spoiler:Ruby Gillis]] is revealed to be dying of "galloping consumption" (acute tuberculosis of the lungs). May be considered a play on this, as in childhood [[spoiler:Ruby]], instead of fainting gracefully at the scene of a drama, would usually just go into hysterics. However, it's still a TearJerker. Especially since [[spoiler:Ruby]], having been rather shallow all her life, is terrified to die and leave everything she's always considered important behind her. While she says she "doesn't doubt but that she'll go to Heaven", she's afraid because frivolity is all she's ever known, and now she's facing the unknown rather unprepared for it.
68	* Creator/AgathaChristie describes in her autobiography how her elderly grandmother tried to make Agatha seem more interesting to suitors by speaking of how frail and sickly she was. This resulted in the suitors (being 20th-century boys) becoming very concerned, and Agatha very ''annoyed'', since she was as healthy as anything.
69	* A gender-flipped example in ''Literature/WutheringHeights'' where it is Edgar who dies of a wasting illness. Actually there is a lot of this kind of thing in ''Wuthering Heights'' - BrainFever in particular. Emily Bronte appears to flipflop on whether brain fever is caused by intense emotion (when Cathy seems to be suffering more from hypermanic episodes), or by [[CatchYourDeathOfCold getting soaking wet]] or actually contagious. People get it all three ways, and it kills at least three people.
70	* In Boris Vian's [[Literature/FrothOnTheDaydream ''L'écume des jours'']], Chloé dies from a water lily growing in her lungs (yes, it's a weird novel), the effects of which, besides a cough, are largely to make her beautifully pale and languid.
71	* ''Literature/SherlockHolmes'':
72	** The novels contain a [[UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom notable subversion]]. Evidently, the only thing more wringing than the plot development where someone turns out to have consumption is the plot development where it turns out ''no one'' has consumption.
73	** The Holmes canon has a couple of cases of BrainFever, usually brought on by severe stress, which reads to the modern reader as a much more scientific version of this. (Both Doyle (in RealLife) and Watson (in the story) were doctors, and as such, not likely to tolerate the usual version of this trope, with such a vague diagnosis and such a vague cause--but brain fever was an actual, contemporary diagnosis made by actual doctors, and still is, under the more specific headings of "Encephalitis", "Meningitis", "Cerebritis", Scarlet Fever, and, as in the case of the brain fever in ''The Naval Treaty'', possibly "stress-induced psychotic break".)
74	** Played perfectly straight in "The Missing Three-Quarter", where the titular rugby player went missing [[spoiler:because his TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth fiancee died of tuberculosis]].
75	* In one Series/DoctorWho Literature/EighthDoctorAdventures novel, ''Camera Obscura'', the Doctor and his companions visit the Victorian era, and the Doctor is a bit under the weather and is [[GoodThingYouCanHeal recovering from having a sandbag dropped on him, and consequently his lungs crushed flat and his heart punctured by his broken ribs]]. He [[MinoredInAsskicking gets into a fight]], goes ash-white and faints, and is suspected of having consumption. Note that he's [[{{Bishounen}} kind of a prettyboy]] and his usual costume is a [[GorgeousPeriodDress bottle-green frock coat, a cravat, a double-breasted waistcoat]], etc., so it doesn't take much to make him look like a consumptive Victorian poet, which may have some connection to the fact he generally [[{{Fainting}} swoons an awful lot]].
76	* Parodied, or PlayedForDrama, in ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'', depending on how you read the novel. In classic literature, tuberculosis was used as a stock disease. It was rarely referred to by name, but the symptoms were always the same: a young lady would become pale and sleepy, and a blush would show on her sickly face. When Van Helsing refuses to name Lucy's illness, the reader of the era would have assumed that she has tuberculosis. [[spoiler: But actually, Van Helsing realizes that she's becoming a vampire.]]
77	* ''Literature/ATreeGrowsInBrooklyn'' has three consumptives: Johnny's brother Andy, neighbor Henny Gaddis, and Sergeant [=McShane=]'s wife, Molly. Henny is the only one Francie actually meets, and she can't believe he's dying because he has such bright eyes and rosy cheeks.
78	* In Creator/LoisMcMasterBujold's ''Literature/VorkosiganSaga'', the "Time of Isolation" is a period of history on the planet Barrayar when they were cut off from galactic society and regressed to a feudal society. In ''Komarr'', Ekaterin Vorsoisson mentions that when girls pretend it's the Time of Isolation they always leave out all the bits about dying in childbirth or of dysentery. If they're ever dying romantically of a disease, "it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control."
79	* ''Literature/JonathanStrangeAndMrNorrell'':
80	** Subverted by Lady Pole. Superficially she would have appeared to have something like TB (exhaustion, languor, weight-loss, depression, etc.) but in fact, she was being harassed (i.e. slowly tortured to death by being forced to dance, night after night) by faeries. Quite a few people were seriously worried about her health but her mother refused to hear a word of it. Stephen Black, meanwhile, has the same affliction, but notes that unlike Lady Pole (a wealthy white woman of high social standing) he, being a black servant, doesn't get the dignity of calling it an "illness" and is simply considered to be poorly disciplined.
81	** Played straight, however, with the disease that kills Lady Pole in the first place- she's shown having a coughing fit, is pale, can't gather the strength to rise off her couch, and is never diagnosed because her mother never let her see a doctor (causing a number of doctors to sniff and say that while Mr. Norrell's feat of magic was impressive, if they'd been allowed to practice their trade he wouldn't have needed to bring her back to life at all).
82	* This is precisely what DelicateAndSickly Peter dies of in the treacly 1982 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross novel ''Literature/RememberTheSecret''. He's even taken to heaven by angels.
83	* In ''Literature/CrimeAndPunishment'', [[spoiler: Katerina Ivanovna]] dies of consumption after Marmeladov's funeral.
84	* In Susann Cokal's ''Literature/BreathAndBones'', Famke suffers from TB in a curious way - she coughs a lot, then coughs blood a lot, then gets treatment, and then it eventually returns...though it [[spoiler: is not what actually kills her in the end.]]
85	* Averted in Anthony Trollope's 47 novels in which the heroine is generally quite healthy and suffers only in agonizing over the choice of a beau. To be fair, however, Trollope wrote mostly about the middle classes while Dickens wrote mostly about the lower classes. Trollope doesn't avoid death, it's just that his characters die realistically and unsentimentally - when they die on stage.
86	* Averted--or perhaps subverted-- in {{Creator/Betty MacDonald}}'s ''Literature/ThePlagueAndI'' which shows us what it was really like in a TB sanitarium.
87	* {{Discussed\|Trope}} in ''Literature/SenseAndSensibility'' -- overly romantic, teenage Marianne Dashwood initially considers the thirty-five-year-old Colonel Brandon to be decrepit, citing his complaints of joint pain on a rainy day. Her more practical sister Elinor remarks that if he'd been flushed and hollow-eyed from a life-threatening fever, Marianne would have found that attractive.
88	* One one-scene character in ''Literature/{{Sharpe}}'s Regiment'' is a streetwalker by the name of Belle, who's got terminal tuberculosis. Sharpe spots the symptoms straight away.
89	-->She had a scarf wrapped about a thin face that was bright-eyed with consumption. It was odd, he thought, how the dying consumptives went through a period of lucent beauty before [[SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome their lungs coughed up the bloody lumps and they died in racking agony.]]
90	* ''Literature/UncleTomsCabin'' contains an absolutely textbook example of both this and TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth in the person of little Eva St. Clare. Fortunately, it drops in plenty of general tips about education, evangelism and (of course) equality along the way.
91	* {{Exploited\|Trope}}, {{Reconstructed}} and played with every which way in ''Literature/TheEssexSerpent''; Reverend Ransome's [[DeathOfTheHypotenuse narratively doomed wife]] Stella is sick with tuberculosis and everyone is very much of the opinion that being TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth suits her to the ground; she feels closer to God and more in love with her family as a result of it. It also [[BettyAndVeronica contrasts her]] with the solid, earthy, IronWoobie heroine Cora. However, far from being TheDiseaseThatShallNotBeNamed, the characters (including a surgeon) talk frankly about TB and its symptoms, treatment and prognosis in line with the ([[ShownTheirWork carefully researched]]) medical knowledge of the era.
92	* In the world of ''Literature/TheLockedTomb'' the Seventh House is prone to a distinctive form of hereditary blood cancer (possibly related to Ali Macgraw's notoriously photogenic leukemia in ''Film/LoveStory'') that gives its sufferers a morbid beauty. (There is also a practical benefit - Seventh House necromancers can power their magic with the death energy of their own terminal illnesses.)
93	* ''Literature/LayDownYourArms'' has a notable aversion. The Althaus estate is hit by an epidemic of a disease that is explicitly named as - no, not tuberculosis - cholera, another killer disease of the age, and its ugly effects on the patients aren't glossed over. And nine people on the estate contract the disease and die in the span of a single week, with the protagonist staying healthy by nothing but dumb luck.
94	* ''Literature/{{Frankenstein}}'': A pre-Victorian example exists through Victor's nervous illness that he comes down with after the horrifying night where he creates the monster.
95	* In the backstory of ''Literature/TheGoblinEmperor'', the protagonist's beloved mother, the Empress Chenelo, died in her mid-twenties of an unspecified lingering wasting disease.
96	[[/folder]]
97
98	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
99	* Creator/TheBBC writers inserted examples into ''Series/LarkRiseToCandleford''. The Post Office inspector takes sick after storming out of the post office having caught Dorcas in the act of providing Irish labourers with out-of-hours service. He faints, falls off his horse and is rescued, brought into the post office in a delirium burbling about his lost love Helena (or Eleanor, it's not clear which). A similar thing happens with Thomas Brown, played for laughs, when he falls off his bicycle in high dudgeon over Miss Ellison's treatment of her brother, and Cabbage Patterson's wife takes to her bed and allows the constable to woo Pearl Pratt. ''None of these episodes are in the original book.''
100	* Parodied in a ''Series/SaturdayNightLive'' sketch: the faux-Dickensian adventures of "Miles Copperthwaite" (Creator/MichaelPalin). Laraine Newman portrayed a brave, dying girl -- who seems to have been bravely dying for ''ages''.
101	* Also parodied in ''Series/TheGoesWrongShow''. When Robert has to rapidly explain the whole plot of the GenerationalSaga "Summer Once Again" in six minutes (having eaten up the show's airtime by resetting after mistakes in the first scene), it turns out most of the characters are secretly dying. In keeping with the Cornley Amateur Dramatic Society's talent for picking hacky potboiler scripts, the disease is ''typhoid''--which, while deadly and period-appropriate, is a far more acute illness that would not progress over decades.
102	[[/folder]]
103
104
105	[[folder:Music]]
106	* Music/VanMorrison's "T.B. Sheets" is an [[SubvertedTrope subversion]], emphasizing just how [[BodyHorror unpleasant]] TB really is.
107	[[/folder]]
108
109	[[folder:Poetry]]
110	* In Charles Hubert Millevoye's highly popular early-nineteenth-century poem "La chute des feuilles" ("The Falling of the Leaves"), in which a sick young man wanders mournfully in the woods musing on his upcoming death, the illness is not specified, but is likened to a flower withered by a cold blast of wind.
111	[[/folder]]
112
113	[[folder:Radio]]
114	* ''Radio/BleakExpectations:'' Parodied to merry hell and back with Flora [[MeaningfulName Diesearly]], who Pip Bin meets, falls in love with instantly, and after a long engagement marries, at which point Flora comes down with frequent fainting spells, which soon render her bedridden, and are eventually diagnosed as being the dread hand of Non-Specific Weakness, which is ''potentially'' fatal. Pip's attempts to cure it wind up causing Flora Diesearly to... [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin die early]].
115	[[/folder]]
116
117	[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
118	* A ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}}'' technology supplement for {{steampunk}} campaigns has controlled inoculation with tuberculosis as a method for rich women to look suitably wan and feeble and hence, attractive. The {{squick}} is intentional.
119	* While ''TabletopGame/{{Deadlands}}'' [[MultipleChoicePast has killed Vanessa Hellstromme in several ways]], a mysterious terminal lung disease that made her delicate and weak, but no less beautiful, has factored in on multiple occasions. While it should have been diagnosable by the early 19th century, everything else about Vanessa's disease looks like classic fictional depictions of tuberculosis.
120	[[/folder]]
121
122	[[folder:Theater]]
123
124	* Fantine in ''Theatre/LesMiserables'' dies of an unspecified disease ([[AllThereInTheManual identified in]] [[Literature/LesMiserables the novel]] as consumption/tuberculosis) and passes shortly after singing a beautiful song to her absent daughter. Unlike most examples, she is certainly not chaste (she had been employed as a prostitute for weeks before) nor traditionally beautiful (she's already had her hair chopped off and teeth removed, although the number of the latter depends on the production and is almost always HandWaved as her back teeth so that they don't have to perform dental work on an actress every night). In [[Film/LesMiserables2012 the film]], she is barely able to sing and coughs the whole way down.
125	* Verdi's opera ''La Traviata'' was loosely based on The Lady of the Camellias, so it's no surprise that lead female Violetta Valery suffers from this kind of thing.
126	* Another operatic use of this trope is Mimi in ''Theatre/LaBoheme''. She faints immediately after first entering Rodolfo's apartment; he sees her pale complexion and falls in love. In the end, not surprisingly, she dies from consumption/tuberculosis.
127	%%* ''Theatre/{{Rent}}'' is a modernization of ''La Bohème'' that substitutes AIDS for tuberculosis.
128	* The operatic version of this trope was mocked by Creator/AnnaRussell in "Anaemia's Death Scene." Anaemia, about to die of TB, claims to have no breath and no strength, but her singing defies her own description.
129	* In ''The Saint of Bleecker Street'' by Gian-Carlo Menotti, Annina dies of a disease that makes her face look increasingly pale and otherworldly. Her visible wounds are supposed to be the stigmata.
130	[[/folder]]
131
132	[[folder:Video Games]]
133	* Subverted in ''VideoGame/RedDeadRedemption2''. When [[PlayerCharacter Arthur Morgan]] contracts tuberculosis, he [[WeightLossHorror loses weight rapidly]] (to the point where [[NothingButSkinAndBones it's impossible for him to be anything but emaciated and frail]]), his eyes become sunken and bloodshot, and his complexion becomes [[EeriePaleSkinnedBrunette noticeably paler]]. It also [[GameplayAndStoryIntegration affects the gameplay]]: the [[LifeMeter health]] and [[SprintMeter stamina]] cores, reflecting Arthur's physical prowess, drain much faster than normal after he becomes sick.
134	[[/folder]]
135
136	[[folder:Visual Novels]]
137	* The Pale Bride of ''VisualNovel/AnalogueAHateStory'' suffered a non-Victorian version of the trope. Though the exact nature of her disease is left ambiguous, it compromised her immune system and left her with [[YourDaysAreNumbered only a few years to live]]. The situation was so bleak that her father opted to place her in [[HumanPopsicle suspended animation]] instead. When the mysterious girl was awakened centuries later, culture and technology had regressed so severely aboard the ship that her new adoptive family simply couldn't grasp that she was ill. All they saw was an [[RavenHairIvorySkin unusually pale]], beautiful girl.
138	[[/folder]]
139
140	[[folder:Webcomics]]
141	* In ''Webcomic/NextTownOver'', Markus [[http://squidbunnies.com/nto/?p=326 thinks]] that Vane Black looks faint and pale and might have consumption. Given her previously revealed antics, this is improbable.
142	[[/folder]]
143
144	[[folder: Web Original]]
145	* Discussed in the ''WebAnimation/OverlySarcasticProductions'' video on ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'', where Red takes a moment from the summary to describe how Victorian romantic heroines had an alarming tendency to get sick, usually with tuberculosis, so the audience for ''Dracula'' would have seen Lucy's sudden sickness as more of the same- and thus get blindsided by the twist that it is both serious and plot-relevant- Lucy is suffering from anemia because Dracula's been feeding from her.
146	[[/folder]]
147
148	[[folder:Western Animation]]
149	* An episode of ''WesternAnimation/DrawnTogether'' had Princess Clara contract "the consumption".
150	[[/folder]]
151
152	[[folder:Real Life]]
153	* TB was responsible for around 1-out-of-5 deaths in late 1800s UK, mostly affecting the urban poor.
154	* Marie Duplessis, the famous French courtesan who inspired ''La dame aux camelias'' and by extension ''Theatre/LaTraviata'', really did die of tuberculosis, and her last two lovers stayed with her until the end.
155	* It was considered fashionable and romantic for young women to seem sickly. To achieve this, many turned to morphine. Some scholars have suggested that [[OfCorsetHurts tight-lacing]] became fashionable in part because it mimicked the symptoms of tuberculosis.
156	* It has been commented that tuberculosis lent itself for literary treatment in the 19th century because its symptoms are such that they can be aestheticized, while this is not so easy with other great killers of that era like typhoid or especially cholera, where victims die of dehydration as their bodily fluids unappetizingly leave the body via the ... end of the digestive tract. However, these are mentioned in a few later literary works, such as typhoid in ''Literature/{{Buddenbrooks}}'' and cholera in ''Literature/LoveInTheTimeOfCholera'' and ''The Horseman on the Roof''. The latter novel contains horrifying descriptions, prettied up a lot in the movie version.
157	* Many examples of the Goth fashion aesthetic, as well as aspects of the Emo look, can be interpreted as a person who is very much alive trying to look like someone who is dying of Victorian Novel Disease.
158	* Creator/AntonChekhov, Creator/JohnKeats, Music/FryderykChopin, Creator/EdgarAllanPoe, and [[Creator/CharlotteBronte the]] [[Creator/EmilyBronte Brontë]] [[Creator/AnneBronte sisters]] all had young deaths that were, at the very least, attributed to tuberculosis. Their deaths led to the popular notion of "consumption" being the disease of bohemian artists. There was even a romantic idea that the disease made creative geniuses even more creative during the time they had left. Creator/LordByron once commented that, "I should like to die from consumption." Instead, Byron died of a less romantic violent fever. It can definitely be said that he died a cooler death, as his infection came while he was busy fighting for the Greeks against the Ottoman Empire, becoming a national hero in the process.
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Context Main / VictorianNovelDisease