Blood, Breath, and Beauty: Consumption and Vampirism in the Western Imagination

This thesis seeks to re-establish the cultural context of vampirism and its origins in Western literature as having emerged from early modern medical understandings of consumption. Up until the late nineteenth century, consumption – known today as tuberculosis – was a poorly understood illness diagnosed primarily based on social factors. A cross-examination of medical and gothic literature reveals the vampire's consumptive origins, and the consumptive's survival through vampire myth.