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Art and literature

Tuberculosis was for centuries associated with poetic and artistic qualities among those infected, and was also known as "the romantic disease". Major artistic figures such as the poets John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe, the composer Frédéric Chopin, the playwright Anton Chekhov, the novelists Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, Charlotte Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, W. Somerset Maugham, George Orwell, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the artists Alice Neel, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Elizabeth Siddal, Marie Bashkirtseff, Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley and Amedeo Modigliani either had the disease or were surrounded by people who did. A widespread belief was that tuberculosis assisted artistic talent. Physical mechanisms proposed for this effect included the slight fever and toxaemia that it caused, allegedly helping them to see life more clearly and to act decisively.

Tuberculosis formed an often-reused theme in literature, as in Thomas Mann 's The Magic Mountain, set in a sanatorium; in music, as in Van Morrison 's song " T.B. Sheets "; in opera, as in Puccini 's La bohème and Verdi 's La Traviata; in art, as in Munch 's painting of his ill sister; and in film, such as the 1945 The Bells of St. Mary's starring Ingrid Bergman as a nun with tuberculosis.