Insights on the history of tuberculosis: Novalis and the romantic idealization

Abstract

Tuberculosis affected the world population since ancient times, being known to Hippocratic physicians. It was not completely understood and it was difficult to manage. From the eighteenth century onwards, it became highly devastating with a high sociological impact until Robert Koch (1843-1910) identified the pathogenic agent of tuberculosis, in 1882. His discovery enabled a progressive identification and control of infectious diseases. Novalis, born Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), an early German Romantic poet, struck by the suffering and death of his fiancée, Sophie von Kühn (1782-1797), who died of a liver abscess as a complication of pulmonary tuberculosis, is a major founder of the romantic idealizing of the disease which lasted until the control of the endemic. Current medicine tends to identify the condition which struck Novalis as cystic fibrosis. However, his name will always be associated with the white plague, the feared and ethereal disease that killed and inspired young artists and talented poets.