The Myth of Tuberculosis Fashion : Victorian History Debunked

This is a great video, and a super helpful series of corrections. I've linked to it as the pinned comment on the Crash Course video. Thanks. -John

The idea of shifting beauty standards to unhealthy traits reminds me of "heroin chic"

The "scientific" pictures of the scrunched up organs of women who wear corsets always crack me up because our organs shrink and shift when we are pregnant. What do they think a woman's lungs and intestines look like when she's 9 months pregnant? Pregnancy messes up your internal organs more than any clothing.

Men in 1830s fashion plates got a full on Barbie silhouette going on.

Fainting, they failed to account for smoke, pollution, and leaking gas as a contributing trigger.

when u talked about fashionable body ideals fluctuating btwn being "delicate" (thin) and "suggesting fertility" (curvy) it just brought me back to growing up in the 00's when being above 110 pounds meant you were considered fat and unattractive, to the 2010s when "thicc" became fashionable and everyone wanted a big butt after having mocked them for a decade people never change, huh

For those that may be on the fence of believing Nicole about how bad TB is still in the world, I have lived on 3 continents so far in my life, one major move was to Kansas, yes, Kansas in the US, before I moved I was advised to get a TB test done (at the time it was this injection under the skin in the hand and if you had a reaction you had TB), I had the same procedure done 2 years later when I moved back home to California. Then 10 years later I moved to Korea, and I was required by the government to have a digital x-ray done when I first arrived then every other year for my particular visa to check for TB, then 5 years after that I fully immigrated to France and again for my particular visa the government required I have a digital x-ray done to check for TB. TB is extremely contagious and there are strains that are antibiotic resistant, so it makes sense these governments would check for it.

During the holocaust if you were in a camp or ghetto that had a TB outbreak you got a certain number or symbol tattooed on your arm by your is number. Then when people were freed or got out they still had issues finding housing or passage on boats because of that extra marking. My Oma and Hupa tried to get out and come to America 8 times and finally got boat passage for all four of them and were about to be turned away because my Hupa had that additional marking on his ID number. But they were warned that it was being checked so my oma and Hupa went into the bathroom and he lifted his skin and she cut his tattoo out of his forearm with her sewing scissors.

I watched John Green’s video and cried out your name and Bernadette’s

As soon as I heard that part in John Green's video, I was like "someone hook him up with the CosTube community!" I'm glad you're addressing this and I hope the folks over at Complexly hear about it.

Was there ever a realistically proportioned fashion illustration? I find it so annoying when sewing patterns use drawings instead of pictures, because the finished product never looks like the drawing.

So glad you made this. I was enjoying his lecture on TB until he brought up corsets and then I was just screaming “noooooooo”

Like most people, I watched John Green's video and thought it was pretty good except for the 19th c fashion part. I think that attributing fashion emphasizing a small waist to the romanticization of TB is a gross oversimplification. Elizabethans didn't romanticize TB, and their fashion tends to emphasize a long, flat, thin torso for women. Early 19th century Regency people did tend to romanticize TB (see: the death of John Keats), and their fashion doesn't focus on the waist at all. The idea that higher hemlines were what made shoes an article of fashion (and that this is only due to TB romanticization) just doesn't click with the timelines. We have many ornate shoes from long before the 19th century-- 18th century Europe loved dainty shoes and clocked stockings, for example. Green is right to call out how absolutely awful it was that Victorians romanticized TB-- a miserable and deadly illness. And he's right that we need to pay more attention to the history of health and disease, and stop acting like TB is a solved problem. But the romanticization wasn't the cause of all things fashion-- that's an answer that relies on stereotypes about the Victorians, which doesn't hold up to much scrutiny.

My father had a latent form of TB that he most likely caught as a child (1930s-1940s). He got run down in his mid-40s. Because he smoked, (and was coughing a lot), he had a chest x-ray, whereupon the doctor could see the TB scars on his lungs. He tested positive for TB; we also had to get tested. But because it was latent he wasn't contagious. This was in the U.S., so TB continued in the U.S. in the 20th century. He grew up in Detroit and his cousin died when she was 10 from the disease.

I live in a neighborhood with houses built in the late 800s /early 1900s. Many of our homes have Sleeping Porches on the 2nd floor. The sleeping porches were thought to be a TB treatment as in providing fresh air to the sick

I still remember the end of the UK ad health campaign agents TB in the 1990s. With signs against spitting, coughing on buses, swimming pools and public toilets. It always struck me as odd, till my gran pointed out that was extremely common when she was young. So only 3 generations on from pushes to reduce transmission.

The other thing that reduced fertility in Victorian times was syphilis. It was rampant and much of the population had it. In women it caused birth defects in their babies and many infants died or were stillborn. A genealogists i heard said if you find a gap of 8 to 10 years in living births, she probably had syphilis. After that time the disease moves to other parts of the body or goes into remission for a while.

My mother came down with TB at 18 years old in 1947. She was consigned to a sanitorium in Seattle, Washington for almost 5 years! During her time there they experimented on the patients with the drug streptomycin. She did get well eventually but for many years of my young childhood (I was born in 1952), she still tested positive. More to your point however, she was shunned and treated as though she had done something to deserve the disease.

I’m noticing how similar so much of the fears from when TB was at its height in Europe/North America are still applicable. Not necessarily to TB, but to things like mental health or wellness culture. Same concerns about what you wear (especially Fiber content and tightness), what you eat, activity choice and level, and environmental toxins.

Thinking about your section on women being more "tuned in" and then when ill to an almost 'supernatural' extent. It's feeling very much like the empath/hypervigilant thing in discussion now. Women were likely just hypervigilant, in nervous system imbalance, and never felt safe enough in society around all the people who controlled their lives (yes, these are generalizations, of course, but in a large amount of history, especially in European societies, men are/were in charge) and I'm blown away that this idea of women being more sensitive and in tune just all comes back to them being oppressed. Amazing