Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

Indeed, the romanticizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as an image. The tubercular look had to be considered attractive once it came to be considered a mark of distinction, of breeding

Cancer, as a disease that can strike anywhere, is a disease of the body. Far from revealing anything spiritual, it reveals that the body is, all too woefully, just the body.

While TB takes on qualities assigned to the lungs, which are part of the upper, spiritualized body, cancer is notorious for attacking parts of the body (colon, bladder, rectum, breast, cervix, prostate, testicles) that are embarrassing to acknowledge. Having a tumor generally arouses some feelings of shame, but in the hierarchy of the body’s organs, lung cancer is felt to be less shameful than rectal cancer.

TB, the person is “consumed,” burned up. In cancer, the patient is “invaded” by alien cells, which multiply, causing an atrophy or blockage of bodily functions.

Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.

As death is now an offensively meaningless event, so that disease widely considered a synonym for death is experienced as something to hide.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious

hat it is a punishment for deviant behavior and that it threatens the innocent—these two notions about AIDS are hardly in contradiction. Such is the extraordinary potency and efficacy of the plague metaphor: it allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable “others” and as (potentially) everyone’s disease.