Now it is cancer’s turn to be the disease that doesn’t knock first before it enters, cancer that fills the role of an illness experienced as a ruthless, secret invasion—a role it will keep until, one day, its etiology is as clear and its treatment as efficacious as those of TB have become. Far from proving anything spiritual, it proves that the body is, alas, and all too much, the body. The tubercular is one “consumed” or dissolved by passion, a passion leading to the dissolution of the body. verzendkosten And Karl Menninger has observed (in The Vital Balance) that “the very word ‘cancer’ is said to kill some patients who would not have succumbed (so quickly) to the malignancy from which they suffer.” His observation is offered in support of anti-intellectual pieties and facile compassion all too triumphant in contemporary medicine and psychiatry: “Patients who consult us because of their suffering and their distress and their disability have every right to resent being plastered with a damning index tab.” Dr. Menninger recommends that physicians generally abandon “names” and “labels”—which would mean, in effect, increasing secretiveness and medical paternalism. But it is characteristic of TB that many of its symptoms are deceptive, that what looks like an increase of vitality is really a sign of death. Date/Time. Rich countries have the highest cancer rates and the rising incidence of the disease is seen as resulting, in part, from a diet rich in fat and proteins and from the toxic effluvia of the industrial economy that creates affluence. And etymology indicates that tuberculosis—from the Latin tuber, meaning bump, swelling—was also once considered a type of abnormal extrusion; the word tuberculosis means a morbid swelling, protuberance, projection, or growth.2 Rudolf Virchow, who founded the science of cellular pathology in the 1850s, thought of the tubercle as a tumor. Cancer has only true symptoms. Cancer is considered a disease of repression, or inhibited passion. Illness is not an event; it is a condition. “A fitful strain of melancholy,” Poe wrote, “will ever be found inseparable from the perfection of the beautiful.” The myth of TB constitutes the next-to-last episode in the long career of the ancient idea of melancholy—which was also the artist’s disease, according to the theory of the four humours. The sufferer is wracked by coughs, then sinks back, recovers breath, breathes normally. TB speeds up life; highlights it; spiritualizes it. Illness as More Than Metaphor By DAVID RIEFF My mother, Susan Sontag, lived almost her entire 71 years believing that she was a person who would beat In Stendhal’s Armance, the anxious mother is reassured by the doctor that her son is not, after all, suffering from tuberculosis but only from that “dissatisfied and critical melancholy characteristic of the young men of his generation and position.” Sadness and tuberculosis became synonymous. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. 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. Bekijk de voorwaarden A cat and fiddle. In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." Many tuberculars died in terrible pain, while some people die of cancer feeling little or no pain up to the end. A school would be his death. Home › AIDS as metaphor › Illness as Metaphor. To take a position is by definition to have changed one's position, to move ground and therefore to see the world differently for a while. Language used in reference to illness frequently takes on a violent tone. Just before Hans “goes down,” the doctor diagnoses a spot on his lungs. ↩, One example, among many, that long predates the Romantic movement is a passage in Act II, Scene 2 of Sir George Etherege’s play The Man of Mode (1676): “When love grows diseas’d, the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a lingring and consumptive passion.” ↩, The myth persists. cit, pp. It is true that there was a certain reaction against the early-nineteenth-century cult of the disease in the second half of the century. The heroine of Erich Segal’s Love Story dies of leukemia—the “white” or TB-like form of the disease, for which no mutilating surgery can be proposed—not of stomach or breast cancer.) The disease itself becomes a metaphor. The disease is often discovered by chance or through a routine medical check-up, and can be far advanced without exhibiting any appreciable symptoms. In l978 Sontag wrote Illness As Metaphor. File history. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. A cancer patient herself at the time, she shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of the patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. Metaphors of sickness and disease have been used widely in writing, politics, and everyday speech to reference things considered bad or threatening. The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are first of all responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured. (This is the first part of a two-part article.). File history. For as long as what causes TB was not understood and the ministrations of doctors remained so ineffective, TB was thought to be an insidious, implacable theft of a life. Alle prijzen zijn inclusief BTW en andere heffingen en exclusief eventuele 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. It was then that the leading metaphors of the two diseases became truly distinct and, for the most part, contrasting. ↩, Groddeck, op. Cancer, as a disease that can strike anywhere, is a disease of the body. Not being religious myself, I had no particular axe to grind, and was surprised by the vehemence of the hostility my remark gave rise to. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 . The poor and the rich get both TB and cancer; and not everyone who has TB coughs. Cf. Susan_Sontag_Illness_As_Metaphor_1978.pdf(file size: 6.27 MB, MIME type: application/pdf) Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 1978. The cancer patient “shrivels” (Alice James’s word) or “shrinks” (Wilhelm Reich’s word). By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is - just a disease. Any body that looks in his face may see he’s consumptive. 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. Sadness made one “interesting.” It was a mark of refinement, of sensibility, to be sad. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Surely everyone in the nineteenth century knew about, for example, the stench in the breath of the consumptive person. Two diseases have been spectacularly, and similarly, encumbered by the trappings of metaphor: tuberculosis and cancer. Contact with someone afflicted with a disease regarded as a mysterious malevolency inevitably feels like a trespass; worse, like the violation of a taboo. Shelley wrote on July 27, 1820 to Keats, commiserating as one TB sufferer to another, that he has learned “that you continue to wear a consumptive appearance.” This was no mere turn of phrase. Original Cast Recording. So much for the germ theory of disease. The overnourished, unable to eat. The metaphor of the psychic voyage is an extension of the romantic idea of travel that was associated with tuberculosis. The comparable distortion—taking a loathsome, painful disease and making it the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of “spiritual” feelings and “critical” discontent—in the twentieth century is with insanity. Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time. The disease becomes adjectival. And in his letter of November 1820, Keats exclaims: “My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well.”. 101-102. Above all, it was a way of making people “interesting.” This idea—of how interesting the sick are—was given its subtlest and most influential formulation by Nietzsche in The Will to Power and other writings, and has been amplified by the brilliant contemporary Nietzschian E. M. Cioran, whose essay “On Sickness” begins: “Whatever his merits, a man in good health is always disappointing.” In fact, though Nietzsche never mentioned a specific illness, those famous ideas about illness are mainly a reprise of the clichés about TB. In The Wings of the Dove, Milly Theale’s doctor prescribes a love affair as a cure for her TB; and it is when she discovers that her duplicitous suitor Merton Densher is secretly engaged to her friend Kate Croy that she dies. 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. 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. All responsibility is lifted because one is in a state of objective, physiological decadence or deliquescence. My subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. 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). 5.0 van 5 - 1779 beoordelingen, * De voordelen van bol.com gelden niet voor het gehele assortiment. Dagboeken en aantekeningen 1964-1980, Digitale cadeaubon - 5 tot 150 euro - bestel via website, Bezorging dezelfde dag, 's avonds of in het weekend*, Ophalen bij een bol.com afhaalpunt mogelijk. This experience reminded me of the bookIllness as Metaphor by the American writer, critic, and political activist Susan Sontag, famous not only for her formidable intellect but for her outspoken and often vicious critique of other writers’ works as well as for the rapacity and ignorance of the Western world. There was a notion that TB was a wet disease, a disease of humid and dank cities. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a meta-phor), that horror is imposed on other things. Next page. Henri Amiel, the Swiss writer and tubercular, wrote in 1852 in his Journal intime: Sky draped in gray, pleated by subtle shading, mists trailing on the distant mountains; nature despairing, leaves falling on all sides like the lost illusions of youth under the tears of incurable grief…. Illness as Metaphor.” The treatment for my current flare began as expected, with a rapid-fire attempt to dominate the body with a high dosage of steroids and organ transplant drugs. Her books include Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, and The Volcano Lover. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p.3. asked his friend Tom Moore, himself a tubercular, who was visiting Byron in Patras in February 1828. Welke opties voor jouw bestelling beschikbaar zijn, zie je bij het afronden van de bestelling. When he comes to be a little stronger, who knows what a year or two’s Latin may do for him? Als we je account op een ander apparaat herkennen, hoef je niet opnieuw de keuze te maken. A discussion of the ways in which illness is regarded pays particular attention to fantasies that pertain to cancer... bol.com | Illness as a Metaphor | … The poverty may not be as literal as Mimi’s garret in La Bohème; the tubercular Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux camélias lives in luxury, but inside she is a waif. TB makes the body transparent. St. Jerome must have been thinking of a cancer when he wrote: “The one there with his swollen belly is pregnant with his own death.” (“Alius tumenti aqualiculo mortem parturit.”). cit., p. 6. Nevertheless, TB retained most of its romantic attributes—as the mark of a superior nature, a becoming frailty—through the end of the century and well into ours. It may be, is increasingly thought to be, something in the environment that has caused the cancer. The patient has an opaque body that must be taken to a specialist to find out if it contains cancer. 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