Illness as Metaphor

"The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured. Such a disease is, by definition, mysterious."

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

"The earliest literal definition of cancer is a growth, lump, or protuberance, and the disease's name—from the Greek karkinos and the Latin cancer, both meaning crab—was inspired, according to Galen, by the resemblance of an external tumor's swollen veins to a crab's legs; not, as many people think, because a metastatic disease crawls or creeps like a crab. But etymology indicates that tuberculosis was also once considered a type of abnormal extrusion: the word tuberculosis—from the Latin tuberculum, the diminutive of tuber, bump, swelling—means a morbid swelling, protuberance, projection, or growth."