 Major artistic figures such as the poets John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe, the composer Frederic Chopin, the playwright Anton Chekhov, the novelists Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, the Brontë family, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, W. Somerset Maugham, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the artists Alice Neel, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Elizabeth Siddal, Marie Bashkirtseff, Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley and Amedeo Modigliani either had the disease or were surrounded by people who did.A widespread belief was that tuberculosis assisted artistic talent, as witness the number of great artists who were affected.Physical mechanisms proposed for this effect included the slight fever and the toxaemia caused by the disease, which allegedly helped them to see life more clearly and to act decisively.