Koch's postulates and the search for the AIDS agent.

For a brief period during the Romantic Age, consumption became a mark of tragic beauty. The English poets Keats and Shelley symbolized the romantic and consumptive youth of the 19th century. Mimi in Puccini's La Boheme represented the melancholy ideal, a portrait drawn from an actual young lady who died of tuberculosis. "Decay and disease are often beautiful, like ... the hectic glow of consumption," said Thoreau on seeing the first brilliant colors of maple trees in the autumn of New England. And Elizabeth Barrett Browning once remarked, "Is it possible, Robert, that genius is just a matter of phthisis?" Romantics believed that consumption was a trait often associated with gifted and talented people. For it was both professional and popular opinion, during this time prior to the germ theory of disease, that consumption was a constitutional trait. The disease frequently struck young men and women in their prime, condemning many of them to early death. Wrote Keats in the spring of 1819: "Youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies." He could have been describing acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in 1984. Such notions concerning the beauty and genius of the tuberculous patient were swept away in 1882 when Koch discovered that tuberculosis was an in-