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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. When did Kafka write to a friend from a sanitorium two months before he died?
(a) April 1924.
(b) March 1924.
(c) June 1924.
(d) May 1924.

2. In Chapter 1, what was thought about cancer and its nature?
(a) Intractable and capricious.
(b) Stubborn and incurable.
(c) Unmanageable and deadly.
(d) Hopeless and fatal.

3. In Chapter 1, if a disease was treated as a mystery to be feared, how would it be felt to be?
(a) Infectious.
(b) Pernicious.
(c) Endemic.
(d) Contagious.

4. In Chapter 1, what words does Sontag use to describe the type of invasion cancer is?
(a) Ruthless and secret.
(b) Fierce and unyielding.
(c) Savage and ferocious.
(d) Vicious and unrelenting.

5. Why did Wilhelm Reich believe that Freud got cancer?
(a) He withdrew from life.
(b) He yielded to resignation.
(c) He gave up.
(d) He remained unhappily married.

Short Answer Questions

1. In what work did Nietzsche write about how interesting the sick were?

2. What does contact with someone afflicted with a disease that appeares to be a mysterious malevolency feel like, as described in Chapter 1?

3. When was tuberculosis discovered to be a bacterial infection?

4. When did Keats write a letter to Fanny Brawne?

5. When did the Concourt brothers write about TB in their novel Madame Gervaisais?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Sontag want to debunk about illness as a metaphor in her book?

2. How did Sontag see people treated who had cancer, and why?

3. Which economic spheres are affected by tuberculosis and by cancer?

4. Why does Sontag believe that cancer patients were not told about their illness, but patients with cardiac disease were told about their condition?

5. How were metaphors of TB broken up in the twentieth century?

6. Why did Insarov, the hero in Turgenev's On the Eve, get TB and die?

7. What did Marie Bashkirtsev write about having tuberculosis?

8. What is the origin of the word tuberculosis?

9. How was TB seen as a disease of passion?

10. What stages does cancer have and how does it progress?

(see the answer keys)

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