Scholar: Jane Austen likely died of TB

LONDON, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- British novelist Jane Austen most likely died in 1817 of bovine tuberculosis, not Addison's disease as previously believed, a scholar says.

Although her books "Pride and Prejudice," "Sense and Sensibility," "Emma," "Persuasion," "Mansfield Park" and "Northanger Abbey" are considered classics and all have been adapted recently for the screen, little is known about Austen's private affairs, including what caused the illness in the last years of her life and her death at the age of 41.

The Times of London reported Tuesday eminent surgeon Zachary Cope determined in 1964 from records describing Austen's medical problems that the scribe suffered from the rare condition known as Addison's disease, which affects the adrenal glands.

However, Katherine White, a scholar from the Addison's Disease Self Help Group, studied Austen's papers and states in Medical Humanities she thinks a "simpler explanation for the symptoms" the writer suffered would be that she had contracted bovine tuberculosis from drinking unpasteurized milk.

The Times quoted White as also saying Austen did not appear to have been afflicted with the chronic pain and mental confusion associated with Addison's sufferers.

"In a letter written less than two months before her death, as she was recovering from a period of severe illness where she had been too weak to leave her bed, Jane Austen wrote to a close friend that, 'My head was

always clear, and I had scarcely any pain,'" White said.

"Austen retained her formidable lucidity to the last: less than 48 hours before she died, she dictated 24 lines of comic verse to her sister Cassandra from her sick bed."