View a FREE sample

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

Short Answer Questions

1. At what sanatorium in Chapter 2, did patients carry their X-rays with them?

2. Why did Wilhelm Reich believe that Freud got cancer?

3. When did Thomas Paynell discuss cancer as a canker?

4. In Chapter 2, according to what ancient physician did tumors resemble crabs?

5. In Chapter 1, how does Sontag describe doctors' efforts to cure TB for a long time?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. At the time the book was written, what did many people believe about cancer?

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

5. How was TB romanticized by the mid-eighteenth century?

6. What did Karl Menninger observed about the word cancer?

7. What did Marie Bashkirtsev write about having tuberculosis?

8. Who invented the cult of TB?

9. What example does Sontag provide of sex being prescribed to tuberculars as therapy?

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

TB and cancer are very different diseases. How are TB and cancer very different diseases? How are the diseases generalized? How does that generalization create a mythological construct that is used when writing about the diseases?

Essay Topic 2

The myth of tuberculosis was dispelled in the mid-twentieth century. When were cures for tuberculosis discovered? How was the reality and description of tuberculosis transformed and changed when a cure was found?

Essay Topic 3

In Chapter 5, Sontag compares and contrasts cholera and tuberculosis. How does Sontag compare and contrast cholera and TB? What is communicated about individuality and community through contrast and comparison?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 834 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample