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CHAPTER TWO Contagion as Metaphor in Iberian Christian Scholarship For it was my doleful observation, repeated again and again, that the metaphoric trappings that deform the experience of having cancer have very real consequences: they inhibit people from seeking treatment early enough, or from making a greater effort to get competent treatment. The metaphors and myths, I was convinced, kill. I wanted to offer other people who were ill and those who care for them an instrument to dissolve these metaphors, these inhibitions. I hoped to persuade terrified people who were ill to . . . regard cancer as if it were just a disease—a very serious one, but just a disease. Not a curse, not a punishment, not an embarrassment. Without “meaning.” Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors IN HER ESSAYS on epidemic disease, Susan Sontag argues powerfully against granting diseases metaphoric significance. She observes that by describing diseases with figurative language, we force upon the ill a host of associations that determine both the nature of their sickness and the significance of the state of those suffering. To help them confront their condition directly, it is vital to strip disease of its metaphors and allow the sick to understand their illness as nothing more than a clinical condition.1 Diseases have no “meaning” for Sontag; they are nothing more than physical ailments. She advises us to calm our imaginations and to moderate our language on the subject of illness. It is possible that Sontag’s arguments have so much power because the reader, while acknowledging their eloquence, also senses their futility. Disease, especially contagious disease, has shown a remarkable capability to repeatedly break through the narrow confines of literal language in order to accommodate the fears and fantasies of society. Sontag’s analysis gains authority from its reference to the effectiveness and legitimacy of modern medicine. In her writings, the division between premodern and modern medicine is a clear one.2 Relying perhaps too easily on the clarity of the modern-premodern distinction, she directs an intense critique toward overly psychological paradigms of health, linking contemporary theories of psychosomatic causation to medieval miasma theory.3 The references here and elsewhere to medieval notions of disease etiology occur when Sontag wishes to disparage 38 Infectious Ideas views with which she disagrees. It was because people did not understand the diseases they observed, she argues, that they gave them so much meaning. The same is true for cancer and, now, AIDS. It is characteristic of diseases that are imperfectly understood, she claims, that we assign them complex and opaque etiologies with multiple causes.4 Comparing cancer to leprosy, the disease often portrayed as characterizing the Middle Ages, Sontag writes: “Leprosy in its heyday aroused a similarly disproportionate sense of horror. In the Middle Ages, the leper was a social text in which corruption was made visible; an exemplum, an emblem of decay. Nothing is more punitive than to give disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one. Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness ) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. . . . Feelings about evil are projected onto a disease. And the disease (so enriched with meanings) is projected onto the world.”5 Sontag asserts that despite the widespread presence of leprosy in many parts of the world today, it has lost the significance it possessed previously. This shift occurred principally after the nineteenthcentury discovery of the relevant bacillus, a discovery that rendered the disease less mysterious.6 It is not my intention to dispute Sontag’s use of the Middle Ages, although her polemic certainly leaves itself open to charges of ahistoricism and an overly optimistic faith in the powers of modern medicine.7 The current chapter shows, on the contrary, to what degree Sontag’s concerns can productively direct our attention to the metaphoric uses of the concept of contagion in Iberian Christian texts. Throughout the Middle Ages, disease figured prominently in biblical exegesis, popular sermons, and even chronicles, as a way of referring to people or beliefs thought to be dangerous. Yet, instead of flattening the premodern period into a continuum, as Sontag did, I will show how the meaning of certain diseases such as leprosy and the plague in Iberian Christian texts were contingent upon not only the immediate concerns of specific...

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