Illness As Metaphor Quotes

“I wonder if the hypochondriac him or herself is a metaphor, a condensed node of ideas about illness crushed together into one individual. I am pressed between these layers of meaning like a flower preserved between the pages of a book, trapped in narratives about my sickness that have already been written.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“Illness is a story we tell about ourselves. The narrative is the connective tissue that joins together the symptoms and perceptions and makes sense of them. It's how impenetrable concepts like death and life become something that can be incorporated comfortably into day-to-day existence. A serious illness is much easier to cope with if it can be slotted into a familiar structure with a beginning, middle, and end. It's also why metaphors of battle or struggle are so popular for describing sickness. It draws the line between them and us, good and evil.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“Fairy tales and folklore are full of this moment: a potion to be swallowed that will transform or destroy a life....When life is especially difficult or hard, the notion that just a single action could render everything straightforward and easy is especially attractive. This is part of our wider impulse to narrativize. The hardships must mean something. The cure must be dramatic and all-encompassing, because incremental or intermittent improvements make for a terrible story.”
― Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety

“He had not been much of a poet, but poet enough for his love-sonnets and satires to weaken his lungs.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kingdoms of Elfin

“The text's construction of an ailment as the product of a conflict with supernatural beings...renarrates the suffer's experience in martial and heroic terms. If recited to victims of the illness, the charm had the potential to help them renegotiate their self-perception.”
― Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity (Anglo-Saxon Studies, 8)

“But hypochondria is a plotless story, a deviation from the regular progression of an illness from stage to stage. Without a firm diagnosis for my unreliable symptoms, I am stuck in the first scene of the drama, endlessly looping around the first few lines of dialogue. The compulsion to narrativize this experience is always there, but always thwarted. The comfortable point at which to tell the story never arrives, because everything is always in present tense. No narrative structure can help those who never get to turn the page on the opening line.”
― Caroline Crampton