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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What was fever a sign of in TB, as described in Chapter 3?

2. When did TB become a new reason for exile or a life that was mainly traveling?

3. When did Schlegel write his essay On the Study of Greek Poetry?

4. In Wings of the Dove, what did Milly Theale's doctor advise as a cure for her TB?

5. What did the Latin word "cancer" (10), mean?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Sontag compare illness to a kingdom?

2. When and why was it possible to separate the definitions of cancer from TB?

3. How did "romantic agony" (29) derive from tuberculosis and its metaphors?

4. At the time the book was written, what did many people believe about cancer?

5. What does Sontag reveal about metaphor and tuberculosis (TB) and cancer?

6. What example does Sontag provide of sex being prescribed to tuberculars as therapy?

7. What conversation did Byron have with his friend Tom Moore in 1828?

8. How did the apperance of tuberculosis become a staple of nineteenth-century manners?

9. What is the origin of the word tuberculosis?

10. What does Sontag want to debunk about illness as a metaphor in her book?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

TB and cancer are very different diseases. How are TB and cancer very different diseases? How are the diseases generalized? How does that generalization create a mythological construct that is used when writing about the diseases?

Essay Topic 2

Footnotes are notes, explanations, or comments usually shown at the bottom of a page of text. What is the purpose of footnotes? What benefits are there to using footnotes? How and why does Sontag use footnotes in the text?

Essay Topic 3

Susan Sontag is the author of Illness as Metaphor. Why did Sontag write Illness as Metaphor?

(see the answer keys)

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