Phthisis or consumption would, after the 1880s be identified by the presence of the tubercle bacillus and treated as an infectious disease. During the early nineteenth century it was identified by a cluster of symptoms such as those presented in this case. Nineteenth century medical advice, as John Harley Warner has noted in The Therapeutic Perspective [p.58], was expected to be 'sensitively gauged not to a disease entity but to such distinctive features of the patient as age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic position, and moral status, and to attributes of place like climate, topography and population density." Consumption was thought to be due to 'irritations' caused by factors which were both internal and external to the individual and linked to constitutional makeup and interactions with the environment. Climate, exercise and diet were seen as important  in removing  these irritations.  Of the three physicians gave the most weight to climate. Because consumption was thought to be especially likely to originate in cold climates physicians, like the one in this case,  thought that they could halt the progress of the disease if they sent their patients to warmer, less irritating, climates.

See Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death for remarkable description of the changing ways that people with tuberulosis were treated as ideas about nature of the disease changed.