Disease in fiction

The book inspired Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th-century Canterbury Tales, which similarly tells the stories of people on pilgrimage in a time of plague.

Fyodor Dostoevsky used the theme of the consumptive nihilist repeatedly, with Katerina Ivanovna in Crime and Punishment; Kirillov in The Possessed, and both Ippolit and Marie in The Idiot.

[3] In English literature of the Victorian era, major tuberculosis novels include Charles Dickens's 1848 Dombey and Son, Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 North and South, and Mrs. Humphry Ward's 1900 Eleanor.

[1] Mary Shelley's 1826 The Last Man created the genre of "post-apocalyptic pandemic thriller" with her story of a plague that is spreading across Europe towards her protagonists in Britain.

[1] More recently, Michael Crichton's 1969 The Andromeda Strain is a science fiction thriller about a world-threatening microbe that a military satellite brings down to Earth and wipes out a town in Arizona.

1919 illustration by Harry Clarke for Edgar Allan Poe 's 1842 The Masque of the Red Death
Victor Hugo 's character Fantine (in his 1862 novel Les Misérables ) with consumption in an 1886 painting by Margaret Bernadine Hall
Jack London 's 1912 The Scarlet Plague was reprinted in the February 1949 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries