The paper uses the correspondence of three Finns – Elias Erkko, Henrik Erkko and Hilda Asp – to analyse the conceptual and practical means with which late nineteenth-century-educated Europeans coped with ill health in general and tuberculosis in particular. While the need to gain control over (the threat of) disease may well be universal, the specific coping methods are historical and context-specific. They are both conceptual and practical, both individual and collective. The paper focuses on the 1880s and 1890s, a period when tuberculosis provided an especially lucrative subsector of the booming European medical marketplace. Sanatorium treatment was still only one among many treatment options, and the theory of the bacterial causation of tuberculosis was far from being universally accepted. The paper charts the options available for people suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis and analyses the eclectic, sometimes idiosyncractic, ways that they combined elements from different conceptual scripts and therapeutic traditions.

This study aimed to identify the influence of illness cognition and background factors on the sense of coherence among junior high school and high school students with congenital cardiac disease. We conducted an examination using the illness cognition scale and sense-of-coherence scale, and verified the reliability and validity of both. Participants were 172 students with congenital cardiac disease and 295 healthy students, who were 12–18 years old. The relationship among sense of coherence, basic and disease-related attributes, and illness cognition in healthy adolescents and those with congenital cardiac disease was investigated. Sense of coherence was higher in boys than in girls and higher in junior high students than in high school students. Adolescents with congenital cardiac disease scored higher for sense of coherence than healthy students. Those who scored lower on the illness cognition scale for “hardships resulting from restrictions and limitations for illness”, “the desire to be understood by others”, “anxieties about the state of the disease and possibility of death”, or “not wanting people to know of one’s disease” showed higher sense of coherence than those who had higher scores for these elements.