Summary

This chapter introduces three new metaphors that have been used to describe tuberculosis and cancer – shame and social decay, energy levels, and a battle or war. It also links these metaphors with twentieth-century politics and compares cancer metaphors to science fiction.

First, cancer has been metaphorically associated with a sense of shame or a ‘punitive’ label, as Sontag calls it (57). Sontag points to several examples of other diseases that were once described using stigmatizing metaphors. She claims that leprosy was commonly viewed as a shameful illness and a physical symbol of moral or social decay. Similarly, plague was used by authors as a metaphor for social or political unrest, inflicting stigma on the entire community where the plague was present. Finally, syphilis was employed as a trope in anti-Semitic polemics, wherein Jews were described as a ‘syphilis’ infecting modern society. This final metaphor, which...