Lara S’s Reviews > Illness as Metaphor > Status Update

Cancer will be partly de-mythicised and it may then be possible to compare something to a cancer without implying either a fatalistic diagnosis or a rousing call to fight by any means whatever a lethal, insidious enemy. Then perhaps it will be morally permissible, as it is not now, to use cancer as a metaphor

„To describe phenomenon as a cancer is an incitement to violence. The use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism and justifies „severe“ measures [.]. The concept of disease is never innocent. But it could be argued that the cancer metaphors are in themselves implicitly genocidal. No specific political view seems to have a monopoly on this metaphor

20th century women‘s fashions (with all their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticising of TB in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

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.