“It's tempting to imagine this romanticization as the opposite as the opposite of stigmatization. Rather than discounting people as stigma does, romanticization lifts them up as paragons of beauty or intellect or some other virtue. But really, I see these as complimentary strategies, used to make "the sick" into an "other," a group of people fundamentally distant and different from the rest of the social order.
…
Imaging someone as more than human does much the same work as imaging them as less than human. Either way, the ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their frailty reveals about everyone else's.”