We often think of sickness as an embodied event that can be empirically measured and physically treated. But illness also lives in art, and disease is a cultural as well as a biological event. For example, in the nineteenth century, tuberculosis was a leading cause of death that manifested (and still does) in violent symptoms—lung hemorrhages, dramatic weight loss, etc. The disease impacted most communities living and laboring shoulder-to-shoulder in poorly ventilated spaces, like tenements and factories. Yet it was memorialized in novels and paintings as a fashionable illness that struck “saintly” bourgeois women without wrecking their bodies. Indeed, surveying tuberculosis’s appearance in Victorian art, one might conclude that the illness marked the “best” members of society, too good for earthly mire, for membership in the next world, just as its representational grammar reinforced class hierarchies and gendered norms. In this course, we will explore a variety of artistic representations of maladies, disorders, and plagues in order to become acquainted with the cultural lives of illness. We will consider how aesthetic forms mediate bodily experience, and how physical ailment might impact art. As a class we will ask: What aesthetic conventions undergird seemingly “natural” or “pathological” phenomena? How have literature, painting, and performance informed medicine and vice versa? How might artistic depictions of illness inflect our personal, social, and political worlds?