l’s Reviews > Illness as Metaphor > Status Update

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.

It is with TB that the idea of individual illness was articulated, along with the idea that people are made more conscious as they confront
their deaths [...] Sickness
was a way of making people "interesting"—which is
how "romantic" was originally defined.

Gradually, the tubercular look, which symbolized an appealing vulnerability, a superior sensitivity, became more and more
the ideal look for women—while great men of the
mid- and late nineteenth century grew fat, founded
industrial empires, wrote hundreds of novels, made
wars, and plundered continents

The passion that people think
will give them cancer if they don't discharge it is
rage. There are no modern Insarovs. Instead, there are
cancerphobes like Norman Mailer, who recently explained that had he not stabbed his wife (and acted
out "a murderous nest of feeling") he would have
gotten cancer and "been dead in a few years himself." hate this man