Two diseases have been spectacularly, and similarly, encumbered by the trappings of metaphor: tuberculosis and cancer. Someone who has had a coronary is at least as likely to die of another one within a few years as someone with cancer is likely to die soon from cancer. And the passion, although usually love, could be a political or moral passion. Suddenly I found that my sense of balance was co… “The word of him creepeth as a cankir” is the way Wyclif translated, in 1382, a phrase in II Timothy 2:17. In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." In contrast, cancer is a disease of growth (sometimes visible; more characteristically, inside), of abnormal, ultimately lethal growth that is measured, incessant, steady. In Stendhal’s Armance (1827), the hero’s mother refuses to say “tuberculosis” for fear that pronouncing the word will hasten the course of her son’s malady. I mean by that that what is not fatal is not cancer. In the earlier, more optimistic form of this fantasy, the repressed feelings were sexual; now, in a notable shift, it is the repression of violent feelings that is imagined to cause cancer. Still, the denial of death does not explain the extent of the lying and the wish to be lied to, doesn’t touch the deepest dread. Sontag points to these as the reigning mystery maladies or defining diseases of the capitalist epoch: tuberculosis until its cure was isolated, and cancer ever since. My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. The desire must die away, then, the desire for the in and out, the up and down of erotic love, which is symbolized in breathing. We might reasonably suppose that this romanticization of TB was some kind of merely literary transfiguration of the disease, and that in the era of its great depredations TB was probably thought to be disgusting—as cancer is now. Book in perfect condition, fast shipping- great price! The dying tubercular is pictured as made more beautiful and more soulful; the person dying of cancer is portrayed as robbed of all capacities of self-transcendence, humiliated by fear and agony. “When I was young,” wrote Théophile Gautier, “I could not have accepted as a lyrical poet anyone weighing more than ninety-nine pounds.” (Note that Gautier says lyrical poet, apparently resigned to the fact that novelists had to be made of coarser and bulkier stuff.) For example, Kenneth Clark, describing Ruskin’s inability to propose to Adele Domecq, says: “His passion brought on a mild attack of tuberculosis” (Ruskin Today, edited by Clark, Penguin Books, 1964, p. 26). Far from proving anything spiritual, it proves that the body is, alas, and all too much, the body. Yet all the evidence indicates that the cult of TB was not simply an invention of romantic poets and opera librettists but a widespread attitude, and that the person dying (young) of TB really was perceived as a “romantic” personality. The metaphor of the psychic voyage is an extension of the romantic idea of travel that was associated with tuberculosis. Agony became romantic in a stylized account of the preliminary symptoms of the disease (for example, debility is transformed into languor) and the actual agony was simply suppressed. I looked up this title intending to buy a copy for a friend and found out that the edition I own is not available anymore. “Verbally I don’t learn anything definite,” Kafka wrote to a friend in April 1924 from the sanatorium where he died two months later, “since in discussing tuberculosis…everybody drops into a shy, evasive, glassy-eyed manner of speech.”. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. Her books include Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, and The Volcano Lover. The policy of hiding or equivocating about the nature of their disease to cancer patients reflects the conviction that dying people are best spared the news that they are dying, and that the good death is the split-second one, or the one that happens while we’re unconscious or asleep. All these notions are recapitulated by Mann in The Magic Mountain and in his short story “Tristan.”. (“You can never be too rich. The goal, according to my doctor, is to “shock” the immune system into submission. TB makes the body transparent. In contrast, cancer is a disease of middle-class life, a disease associated with affluence, with excess. Illness as Metaphor examines in more general than personal terms how society regards illness and being ill, in particular “the punitive or … It described the death of someone (like a child) thought to be too “good” to be sexual, the assertion of an angelic psychology. Susan Sontag writes about a disease she suffered from taking a look at the culture of lies built around disease. TB is disintegration, febrilization; it is a disease of liquids—the body turning to phlegm and mucus and sputum and, finally, blood—and of air, of the need for better air. First came the use of tubercular metaphors to describe love—the image of “diseased” love, of a passion that “consumes.”6 Eventually the image was inverted, and TB was conceived as a variant of the disease of love. It was a way of retiring from the world without having to take responsibility for the decision—the story of The Magic Mountain. 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