Status Updates From المرض كاستعارة

In TB, you are eating yourself up, being refined, getting
down to the core, the real you. In cancer, non-intelligent ("primitive," "embryonic," "atavistic") cells are multiplying, and you are being replaced by the nonyou. Immunologists class the body's cancer cells as
"nonself."

the disease that claimed the
likes of Keats, Poe, Chekhov, Simone Weil, Emily
Bronte, and Jean Vigo was as much an apotheosis as
a verdict of failure

. Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of
moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is
a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test. And
the virtuous only become more so as they slide toward
death. This is standard achievement for TB deaths in
fiction, and goes with the inveterate spiritualizing of
TB and the sentimentalizing of its horrors.

The speculations of the ancient world made disease
most often an instrument of divine wrath. Judgment
was meted out either to a community [...] The diseases around which the
modern fantasies have gathered—TB, cancer—are
viewed as forms of self-judgment, of self-betrayal.