When death was ever present …

… A Beautiful Ending | National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Dealing with the specter of contagion and death was a constant source of anxiety in nineteenth-century America, a facet of everyday life made especially immediate by the grim reality of the numbers. By the early 1900s, one out of every seven deaths in the United States and Europe was caused by tuberculosis, according to figures compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the very randomness of its reach made it especially onerous. Commonly known for centuries as consumption, the highly infectious disease played no favorites when choosing its victims, striking across all segments of society, rich and poor, young and old, men and women of all races and ethnic groups—an ever-present existential threat, in today’s parlance, if ever there was one.