You have to admit, it's quite a love line:

I wish to believe in immortality – I wish to live with you forever.

These words were penned by a love-stricken English poet, the erudite and youthful John Keats. The target of this articulate affection was Fanny Brawne, a genteel woman raised in wealthy pre-industrial London. As sweet as his sentiments may have been, Keats didn't live long enough to give her or us a happy ending. The reason was tragically biological. Keats' lungs were laboring under the occupation of a few billion Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, the causative agent of tuberculosis. The poet may have contracted the disease from his family, having watched both his mother and his older brother die of ‘consumption.’ Eventually, the disease involved his own life, abridging it to a mere 26 years.

Keats had a professional as well as personal interest in tuberculosis. Before he was a poet, he was a physician, trained at the famous Guy's Hospital in England. Keats did not turn to professional writing until the final three years of his life, inspired in part by Brawne, in part by his familial losses. Those three years would be filled with a biological wrestling match between his brain and the bacteria, between his desire to obtain immortality in writing, and his eventual desire for suicide.

Keats first suspected he might have contracted the dreaded disease during a visit to Scotland.