Farewell To The East End

remembered him with little Gillian on his knee, as she dipped soldiers into his boiled egg; she remembered the present of hair ribbons and a bolero. But still she could not think of what to say to him. So in the end she sent a few words on half a sheet of notepaper, to which he sent no reply.
    The funeral took place in Switzerland. The mother returned home, but after a few months she left her husband to live with a sister in Essex. Correspondence continued between mother and daughter, and they met every so often and had a day out together. The father continued to run the pub, but they never corresponded, and Julia never visited. In spite of loneliness, which had become a way of life for Julia, she did not regret leaving home. The memories of drunken revelry repelled her, and thoughts of death haunted her.
    No, she would never, she vowed, never go back to the Master’s Arms.

TUBERCULOSIS

    Youth grows pale, and sceptre-thin, and dies.
‘Ode to a Nightingale’, by John Keats

    Tuberculosis is as old as mankind. Evidence of the disease has been found in a Neolithic burial ground near Heidelberg, Germany and in mummies from Egyptian tombs 1000 years BC; and Hindu writings refer to ‘a consumption’. Hippocrates used the word phthisis to describe the cough, wasting, and ultimate destruction of the lungs. The disease is universal, and bears no relation to climate. It has been found in native tribes of North America, in primitive African tribes and amongst the Inuits of Alaska; China, Japan, Australia, Russia, Corsica, Malaya, Persia have all known it. There is probably no tribe or nation on earth that has been free from tuberculosis.
    The disease has waxed and waned throughout recorded history, usually starting unnoticed, then reaching epidemic proportions, then waning as the population acquires collective immunity to the tubercle bacillus, over approximately a 200-year cycle. In Europe and North America it reached epidemic proportions between around 1650 to 1850 (varying somewhat from nation to nation), and it has been confidently concluded by medical scientists and historians that at the height of an epidemic 90 per cent of any population would have been infected. Of this number 10 per cent would have died. The lungs are the main focus of the bacillus, but they are not the only target; the meninges, bones, kidneys, liver, spine, skin, intestines, eyes – practically all human tissue and organs can be and have been destroyed by tuberculosis. It was called ‘the Great White Plague of Europe’.
    Historically, the highest morbidity from tuberculosis occurred between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Throughout European literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the tremendous creative outburst of the ‘Sturm and Drang’ writers and poets of the Romantic movement dominated the public imagination. Today we look back on their sickly characters, amazed at apparently healthy young women fainting and going into a terminal decline, or languorous youths too weak to do anything much except sit around looking pale and interesting and writing poetry. But this was no morbid fantasy. Lassitude, weakness, weariness, loss of weight and colour were common amongst the young, and they were early signs of infection, unrecognised by most people. By the time coughing, fever and lung haemorrhage occurred the condition was called consumption, and it was too late for effective treatment. The flower of youth was gathered in its prime.
    From ancient times there has been a belief that some relationship exists between tuberculosis and genius. The intellectually gifted are the more likely to contract the disease, and the fire which consumes the body makes the mind burn more brightly. Throughout Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea was fostered in the public imagination that consumption was the product of a sensitive nature and a creative imagination. Did not famous musicians, poets, painters and authors die from consumption? The tenuous connection was widely accepted with gratitude by those grieving the death of an only son or a beloved daughter. Grief needs an outward expression, and if a mother can interpret a few morbid poems written by her dying son as evidence of a genius snatched too soon from the world, she is somewhat comforted.
    Indeed the immense creativity of this period of European history might have been an indirect product of tuberculosis. Opium was widely prescribed for the control of coughing,