Pulmonary Tuberculosis

Pulmonary tuberculosis is the classic consumption. The old word is no coincidence, and it is not merely the romanticization of a disease that consumed entire biographies in the sanatoriums of the 19th century. Consumption means: a person becomes less. They lose weight though they eat. They lose colour though they live. They cough, they sweat through the night, the cheeks hollow out, and in the lungs — there, where the air of the world should flow in and out freely — the tissue corrodes itself.