Consumptive Killers: Tuberculosis and Crime Fiction From L. T. Meade to Doc Holliday.

This article explores the figure of the "criminal consumptive"—individuals suffering from tuberculosis (also known as consumption or phthisis) who were imagined as predisposed to violent crime—in British and American medical literature and fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It highlights how medical authorities, especially after Robert Koch’s 1882 discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus, linked tuberculosis to emotional instability, moral derangement, and homicidal tendencies, a connection reflected in literary works such as L. T. Meade’s 1894 story "The Horror of Studley Grange." The article further examines how early twentieth-century American frontier fiction, notably portrayals of the consumptive gunslinger Doc Holliday by Alfred Henry Lewis and Walter Noble Burns, reinterpreted these pathological tropes as signs of martial valor and frontier toughness, aligning tubercular traits with the violent, fast-paced character of the American West. Thus, the discourse around tuberculosis and criminality was adapted differently across cultural contexts, from a marker of dangerous insanity in British settings to a symbol of rugged heroism in Western frontier narratives.