Love Links & TB

The end was drawing near. Marguerite Gautier, propped up amid her tortured pillows, was feverishly wasting away with "consumption." To her lover Armand, from whom his stern father had parted her a year before, she wrote: "If we had lived together this year, I should not have died so soon."

This belief of Alexandre Dumas' Lady of the Camellias was shared by her vast public. For the 19th century, which made tuberculosis both romantic and fashionable, was sure that somehow it was inextricably connected with thwarted love and melancholia. Early 20th century medicine, which sought to explain everything through germs, laughed at the Camille school of diagnosis. But in recent years, physicians have once again begun to see a connection between tuberculosis and emotional factors. Now a hardheaded Scottish physician, David Morris Kissen, practicing among working-class victims in the unromantic setting of Lanark, has reached a diagnosis of the emotional state which predisposes to tuberculosis. It results, he reports in the Scottish Health Bulletin, from an "inordinate need for affection." But this alone is not enough; it requires the triggering action of a "break or serious threat of a break in the love link," using the word love in its spiritual rather than its sexual sense. Two-thirds of the TB victims studied by Dr. Kissen reported having had such a break, or threat of one. Some of the breaks resulted from death in the family and enforced separations; the vast majority occurred in a "romance, engagement or marriage."

Emotional factors were more conspicuous in patients who were over 35 when their TB was first diagnosed than among younger victims. For the latter, loss of a parent's love was a major consideration. To double-check his findings, Dr. Kissen studied patients whose TB, once fully controlled, had flared up again. Among these, he found 60% whose personality and history fitted the pattern. The prevalence of the pattern set Dr. Kissen to wondering: Since removal of patients to a sanatorium for treatment entails breaking love links, especially for children, is it a good idea to move so many of them? If at all possible, he suggests, patients should be treated at home under proper safeguards.

By Researcher Kissen's evidence, broken love links have filled the world's stages with real-life Camilles.

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