The Story of Tuberculosis in Ireland: An Overview

This chapter presents an overview of Ireland’s lived experience of tuberculosis as represented in the nation’s fiction. I seek to place the history of tuberculosis in Ireland, from 1800 until after its virtual eradication in the mid-twentieth century, in conversation with fictional representations or repressions of a condition so fearsome that until very recently it was usually referred to by code words and euphemisms rather than by its name. We must familiarize ourselves with the historical record in order to grasp the full resonance of the appearances and uses of tuberculosis in literature, and we must also consider the ways in which Irish people thought about the illness in an attempt to understand and perhaps come to terms with it. Until very recently, the Irish literary imagination did not typically lend itself to metaphorical or allegorical representation of tuberculosis. With the exception of a limited period of allegorical use in the National Tales of the early decades of the nineteenth century and again in the 1990s, Irish writers focused instead on the disease’s ungovernable ferocity and the terror and suffering it caused.