Generally speaking, a single cough is safe as it normally is used to gain attention or signal embarrassment. Compare Wring Every Last Drop out of Him. The trope may also lead to a Healthcare Motivation. If the character insists that it's nothing, then it's Definitely Just a Cold. Compare Soap Opera Disease and Victorian Novel Disease. The Law of Conservation of Detail also applies. Note that Chekhov being a doctor had little to do with his unusually long lifespan after diagnosis: before streptomycin, there was no known effective treatment or cure for TB. note Coincidentally, Chekhov himself died of tuberculosis, which he contracted sometime in 1884, finally succumbing to it in 1904, after a good twenty years that are widely considered his most productive period as a writer. Think of this trope as the medical variant of Chekhov's Gun: if someone coughs in the first act, they better be dead by the third. Of course, in real life, people cough all the time from non-life-threatening causes, but those generally don't make for interesting stories. In modern or advanced settings, the presence of a fictional tuberculosis expy is done because the real tuberculosis, while still a nasty disease, is relatively easy to detect and treat using modern medicine. In general, wider knowledge of medical conditions doesn't let writers be specific without slipping up.
Other times it's a hyped up version of unfortunately very real symptoms of chronically overworked people. Thematically, the unnamed disease tends to act like pneumonia or tuberculosis, even in futuristic settings where those real diseases might be cured. The symptoms of tuberculosis (also known as consumption, phthisis, TB, or the White Death) are identical to those of the Incurable Cough Of Death, but death would usually come far more slowly for the TB patient, at least in Real Life. In Western literature the trope was heavily influenced by the prevalence of tuberculosis, an infectious disease considered by many historians to be the greatest killer in human history - yes, even greater than malaria or plague. A more proactive sufferer may be a Death Seeker looking for A Good Way to Die or an Old Master desperate to train The Chosen One before the illness takes them. This trope is almost always carried out by the Littlest Cancer Patient or one who is Delicate and Sickly. The character will probably try to hide it and will usually succeed until they actually pass out. This is usually accompanied by nasty amounts of Blood from the Mouth which is always a bad sign, even when there's no plausible reason for it. If you have a cough, you're going to be dead before the end of the show.
0 kommentar(er)
