TELL magazine: December 2020 - Emanuel Synagogue

By Nicole Waldner
Thoughts and articles from our
community members
In two essays separated by a decade
- “Illness as Metaphor”, 1978 and
“AIDS and its Metaphors”, 1989 -
Susan Sontag describes the damaging
effects of using physical illness as
a metaphor for psychological/spiritual
malaise:
"With the modern diseases (once TB,
now cancer), the romantic idea that
the disease expresses the character is
invariably extended to assert that the
character causes the disease–because
it has not expressed itself. Passion
moves inward, striking and blighting
the deepest cellular recesses."1
Stigma has always attached itself to
the sick. Diseases change, the language
used to describe disease changes,
but stigmas always remain. In the
case of TB (tuberculosis), of which
Sontag’s father died, there was a deep
mistrust of the restless, urban underclass
and their unsanitary, immoral
ways. So deep was the ignorance
about TB for so long, that for centuries,
its lethal contagion remained
unknown, and it was believed to be
hereditary. How many times have
we heard it said: ‘anger is a cancer,
ergo, angry people get cancer’? With
AIDS, it was all too easy to point
the quivering moral finger at homosexuals
and drug addicts. As for the
scarcely understood COVID-19,
perhaps it’s still too early to know
where the stigma will fall, but the
ostensible “meaning” of the pandemic
is already doing the rounds:
Mother Earth’s revenge; Mother
Earth’s call for quiet; Mother Earth
is culling; disease is a demographic
correction. As Sontag says - illness,
even once understood, always needs
to stand for something else: “There is
a peculiarly modern predilection for
20
“SHOW ME A PLAGUE, AND I’LL
SHOW YOU THE WORLD!”
psychological explanations of disease,
as of everything else. Psychologizing
seems to provide control over
the experiences and events (like
grave illnesses) over which people
have in fact little or no control.” 2
TB is an ancient disease, and one
with the earliest known cases of
zoonotic (animal to human) transfer.
Evidence of the disease has been
found in bison dating back 17,000
years, but whether TB emerged
from bovines or via another animal
is unknown. Pre-historic human
remains, from as far back as 4000
BCE, have shown evidence of TB.
In Europe alone, it was responsible
for the deaths of twenty five percent
of people between the 1600s and
1800s. In 1815, one in four deaths
in England were due to “consumption”.
In 1918 in France, one in six
people were still dying from TB.
It was only in the 1880s that TB’s
highly contagious nature was properly
understood; whereupon governments
began mass public campaigns
to transform social interactions,
especially in densely populated urban
areas which were hotbeds of transmission.
Spitting in public was banned,
personal hygiene education was
instituted, and people were urged to
keep their distance from one another.
All of these measures faced serious
social resistance. TB, although
not limited to the urban poor, disproportionately
affected them; with
porters, street vendors, factory workers
and those living in over-crowded
housing being hardest hit.
In the mid-19th century, a German
doctor by the name of Alexander
Spengler claimed to have found the
cure for TB - it was pure, simple
and available in abundance. In its
essence, Spengler’s cure was fresh air,
preferably the high-altitude mountain-kind,
in purpose-built sanatoriums
which he pioneered. The idea
that light, fresh air and sunshine are
all somehow healing is embedded
in our popular beliefs about health.
Nice as they are, it was eventually
a combination of improved sanitation,
pasteurization, vaccination
and the development of the antibiotic
streptomycin in 1946 that
eventually ended TB’s stranglehold.
Larry Kramer, the playwright and
passionate AIDS activist wrote:
Air cure in a school sanatorium, London, 1932, courtesy of Fox Photos/Getty Images