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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. From where did Keats write a letter to Fanny Brawne?

2. How early were synonyms used for tuberculosis, according to the Oxford English Dictionary?

3. Why did Michel in Gide's The Immoralist contract TB?

4. In Chapter 2, from what time did the modern fantasy about cancer begin to take shape?

5. What did people believe cancer patients lacked that caused them to get the disease?

Short Essay Questions

1. What was the earliest literal definition of cancer?

2. What does Sontag reveal about metaphor and tuberculosis (TB) and cancer?

3. What did Marie Bashkirtsev write about having tuberculosis?

4. What conversation did Byron have with his friend Tom Moore in 1828?

5. How might the name of a disease seem to have a magic power?

6. How did the apperance of tuberculosis become a staple of nineteenth-century manners?

7. What is the origin of the word tuberculosis?

8. What is the history of the use of a synonym for TB?

9. How did a character in The Magic Mountain explain symptoms of disease?

10. Who invented the cult of TB?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

In the mid-eighteenth century tuberculosis was romanticized. Why was TB romanticized? How was it perceived to make people interesting?

Essay Topic 2

How did the idea that man created his disease lead to the concept that the sick person caused his illness? What dangers were there in this concept?

Essay Topic 3

Some scientific studies seemed to link emotion and cancer. How did some scientific studies seem to link emotion and cancer? Why does Sontag believe that any apparent link between cancer and emotion is due to incomplete knowledge about cancer, its causes, and a cure?

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