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And:

Many a young consumptive mother gets her shroud shortly after she has purchased the christening frock for her babe.

A 1937 Manual of Tuberculosis for Nurses and Public Health Workers declared that marriage should be forbidden:

Marriage is apt to be a very expensive and dangerous luxury to those who are suffering, or have recently suffered, from tuberculosis of the lungs… . If the patient is a woman, she has not only to face the risk of infecting her husband and her children, but she must take into consideration the fact that pregnancy is liable to aggravate existing disease.

As late as 1952 an authoritative text cited Somerset Maugham’s short story “Sanatorium,” about a young couple in love who disregard the customary strictures.

They were both so young and brave that it was a great pity… . One could wish the novelist would rewrite the story with the boy and girl sensibly waiting for several years… . I am addicted to happy endings.

The textbook phrases gave no hint of the howling whirlpool of emotions that came when love and tuberculosis combined. Richard’s parents dreaded his marriage to Arline. Lucille Feynman, especially, found the idea impossible to bear. Her dealings with her son became harsher as she realized how serious his intention was. In the late spring she sent him a cold, handwritten screed bristling with her fear for his health, her fear for his career, her worry about money, and, indirectly, her revulsion at the possibility of sexual relations. She held nothing in reserve.

“Your health is in danger, no I should say your life is in danger,” she wrote. “It is only natural that when you are married you will see more of her.” She worried about what other people would think (an enemy against which Richard and Arline were learning to circle the wagons). Tuberculosis carried a stigma, and the stigma would attach to Richard. “People dread T.B. When you have a wife in a T.B. sanatorium, no one knows it is not a real marriage. & I know the world considers such a man dangerous to associate with.” She told Richard that he was not earning enough money, that he had been loyal enough already, and that Arline “should be satisfied with the status of ‘engagement’ instead of ‘marriage,’ because in such a marriage you are not getting any of the pleasures of marriage, but only the severe burden.” She warned that she and Melville would not help the couple with money under any circumstances. She appealed to his patriotism, saying that the burden of a sick wife would compromise his ability to serve his country. She reminded him that his grandparents had fled European persecution and pogroms for a country whose freedom he took for granted. “Your marriage at this time, seems a selfish thing to do, just to please one person.” She doubted that he sincerely wanted to marry Arline; she asked whether he was not merely trying to please her, “just as you used to occasionally eat spinach to please me.” She said that she loved him and hated to see him make a noble but useless gesture. She said, “I was surprised to learn such a marriage is not unlawful. It ought to be.”

Melville took a calmer tack. He asked Richard to get professional advice at Princeton, and Richard obeyed, consulting his department chairman, Smyth, and the university doctor. Smyth merely said he preferred to keep out of his staff’s private affairs. He kept to that position even when Feynman went to the extreme of pointing out that he would be in contact both with a tubercular wife and with students. The doctor was concerned to make sure that Feynman understood the danger of pregnancy, and Feynman told him they did not intend to make love. (The doctor noted that tuberculosis was an infectious rather than a contagious disease, and Feynman, typically, pressed him on that point. He had a suspicion that the distinction was an artifact of unscientific medical jargon—that, if there was a difference at all, it was a difference of degree only.)

He told his father that he and Arline did not