Beverly's disease

Consumption is a real disease, known commonly today as Tuberculosis.

It effects the lungs mostly, but can target other organs. Common symptoms are chronic cough with blood-tinged sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss. The weight loss is actually where it gets the name "consumption" from.

Doc Holliday, famously, was a sufferer and was killed by it.

“Sit at my right, and I may smite you; at my left, and you can stay to watch me rule the world.”

In older novels, consumption was often romanticized. Authors and poets would play up the idea that people with consumption were more artistic, more beautiful, more alive, because the disease gave them fevers and could make them look flushed. This movie seemed to go off of that tradition, and completely ignore the reality of the illness.

"Who thought this made absolutely NO SENSE AT ALL?!"

Apparently people who are ignorant of the fact that consumption was a common term for tuberculosis.

How do the angels get to sleep when the Devil leaves his porch light on?

Tuberculosis was and is, primarily a poor man's disease. People who contract it usually live in very bad conditions, are starved, have bad immunity. It was quite common among artists, because they lived poor lives and that is why it is kind of romanticized. Beverly's need for cold was to lower her fevers, although, yeah, they did go overboard with it, at least from a logical point of view. Looking at it as a fairy tale, it's kind of cute.

Fighting a religious war is like fighting over whose imaginary friend is better.

It would have made sense if she seemed at all sick but she looked in normal health.

I particularly thought it was stupid when the optometrist came in and took one look at her and knew she had tuberculosis. Not to mention the fact that she never wears glasses.

I don't require movies to be absolutely factual but they should at least be close enough to the truth that blinding errors don't interfere with the escape from reality that films provide.

I just watched this movie, and will again tomorrow, since I have a two-day rental.

Don't know much about TB, but I did read Betty MacDonald's "The Plague and I" (along with the rest of her books). Her experience was very similar to Beverly's...though Betty had it about 20 years after Beverly, cold conditions were paramount to remedy. For Betty, it was a sanitorium in the Seattle area that threw the windows open to the cold as a cure.

The idea of being in snow with Beverly's toes shouts frost bite to me, but this is after all a fantasy.

I actually live not far from Seattle, but grew up due east about four miles from Lyndhurst, the home on the river. Visited it many times, and enjoyed the 1895, 1916, and 2014 views of NYC....though I am wondering if the upper west side, where the family home was, was a good place for the elite at that time.

But all in all, I think they did a good job...it has me thinking enough to watch it again on my 2-day rental.

Honestly people - in a movie where a horse with wings flies into the sky why are you concerned with technical aspect of bloody sputum? Go with the flow take it for what it is, like it or not but give up trying to justify disease symptoms.... its a FANTASY.

I agree. Beverly flat out tells the optometrist that her disease is not contagious, which is absolutely ludicrous. Tuberculosis is extremely contagious and it is AIR BORNE! I work in a hospital and when we need to enter the room of a patient who has active TB we need to wear breathing masks/hoods. So the fact that Beverly is moving freely around her house (not quarantined to any one room), snuggling in bed with her little sister, and regularly interacting with people is pretty ridiculous.