Boone Ayala’s Reviews > Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection > Status Update

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans came to romanticize consumption, to see the illness as beautiful and ennobling. It’s tempting to imagine this romanticization as the opposite of stigmatization… But really, I see these as complementary strategies used to make the sick into an ‘other’ a group of people, fundamentally, distant and different from the rest of the social order.