Dickens’s consumptive urbanity: science and sentiment in nineteenth-century healthcare

Abstract

The representations in the oeuvre of Charles Dickens of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) char-acterize him as a realist and, at the same time, as a sentimentalist who saw TB as the result of hard-heartedness and the disintegration of communal ties based on affection and mutual support. Using the critical approach of the medical humanities, this article relates Dickens’s understanding about disease and therapy to problems in contemporary healthcare like the unexpected rise of TB in the 1980s, the challenge posed by drug-resistant bacteria, and the discontents with the assembly-line modes of professionalized medical services. It argues that modern health policy and practice can profit from the records found in great works of literature of how communities in previous eras fought disease.