A famous US doctor, Dr Livingstone Trudeau, who was himself a patient of this disease claims that "the struggle with tuberculosis has brought me experiences and left me recollections which I never could have known otherwise and which I would not exchange for a fortune."

In a similar vein, Somerset Maugham went to a sanatorium for two years, fighting tuberculosis. Later he said that he left his bed in the sanatorium with a pang. "I think I learnt a good deal about human nature in that sanatorium that I would never have known. In the sanatorium my imagination was never nimble. It was like a barque under press of sail scudding before the breeze."

Likewise, The Magic Mountain written by Thomas Mann was the first novel which had its setting in a tuberculosis sanatorium. The author started writing the book in 1912 when he was in a sanatorium. It was meant to be a short story but kept Thomas Mann so involved that it finally shaped into a novel. By the time it finished after twelve years it was an apt portrayal of the writer’s life, including a part on his tuberculosis.

Shelley was indeed telling the truth when he wrote in Ode to the West Wind:

And indeed, Shelley did bleed. He was undergoing the agonies of tuberculosis.

A classic example is that of the Bronte sisters — Charlotte, Emily and Ann. All three were suffering from the same disease.

The occasional ecstatic note in Whitman’s poetry can be ascribed to some serious illness.

Similarly, Nobel Prize winner Eugene O’ Neil was working as a sailor when he contracted tuberculosis. He had to go to a sanatorium for some months. This gave him enough time to read and that led to his becoming a famous dramatist.

Alexander Graham Bell, too, survived this disease for about forty years. W.E. Henly, who had lost one foot to a serious disease and was threatened with the amputation of the other, was confined to bed for twenty months. While on bed he wrote:

Numerous examples can be cited of famous personalities who had one serious illness or another or were alcoholics: Edgar Allan Poe, Goethe, Schiller, Milton, Thoreau, Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, Voltaire, Joyce, Rousseau, Kafka, Kipling, Sartre, Tolstoy, Wilde, Washington Irving, Emerson, Ruskin, Cicero and Katherine Mansfield.

In this context, a study published in the British journal of psychiatry claims that psychiatric problems are linked to exceptional creativity. According to the study, psychiatric abnormalities play a vital role in stimulating creativity.

The study conducted by a British psychiatrist Dr Felix Post says: "Mentally ill health may fuel some form of creativity." It further establishes that a genius suffering for his art and losing his health in depression is a fact. Ailments have not spared anybody who is involved in any kind or creative art.

Dr Proust who studied the lives of about three hundred famous personalities says that 72 per cent of novelists and playwrights suffered from depressive conditions. Those suffering from psycho-pathological diseases include 17 per cent politicians, 18 per cent scientists, 26 per cent thinkers, 31 per cent composers, 37 per cent painters and 46 per cent writers. Politicians include Bismark, Hitler and Lincoln.

It is a fact that senses and emotions play a very important role in art. Suffering sharpens the senses and heightens emotions. A disease brings untold miseries, pain and suffering and it is not surprising that this stimulates art.

Nevertheless, we cannot conclude that any kind of physical or mental ailment is good because it manifests genius. In fact, any ailment is not worth the risk. A disease can occur in any person. In a gifted person an illness results in creativity.

The truth is that a disease intensifies whatever talent a person already has. The disease does not create genius but only manifests it. Also most patients develop a inferiority complex and sense of worthlessness and to curb that feeling, often overcompensate with increased effort and productivity. Such people are forced to demonstrate their usefulness and importance to their own selves and to the world.