“Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to express a sense of what was wrong socially. In Shakespeare, there can be an infection in the “body politic,” an abscess that has to be lanced. But full of disease imagery as the Elizabethan theater may be, it does not project the modern idea of a master illness—a total contagion of society. Master illnesses like TB and cancer are used to define the ruling ideas of individual health, and to express a sense of dissatisfaction with society as a whole. Unlike the Elizabethan metaphors—in which illness denotes a social aberration or imbalance that is, in consequence, dislocating to individuals—the modern ones arise when the ideas about individual and society are coming to be polarized, with society conceived as the individual’s adversary. Disease metaphors are used to find society not out of balance but repressive. They turn up regularly in Romantic rhetoric which opposes heart to head, spontaneity to reason, nature to artifice, country to city. When travel to a better climate was invented as a treatment for TB in the early nineteenth century, the most contradictory destinations were proposed. The south, mountains, deserts, islands—their very diversity suggests what they have in common: the rejection of the city. In La Traviata, when Alfredo wins Violetta’s love, his first act is to move her from unhealthy wicked Paris to the wholesome countryside: instant health follows. And Violetta’s giving up on happiness is tantamount to leaving the country and returning to the city—where her doom is sealed, her TB returns, and she dies.”
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