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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. When did Kant compare passion to cancer in Anthropologie?

2. What did Reich call the energy he found equivalent to cancer in the biosphere?

3. When was the influenza pandemic?

4. Where was Dr. O. Carl Simonton a radiologist?

5. What diseases tended to strike each person as a member of an afflicted community in Chapter 5?

Short Essay Questions

1. How was TB different from the great epidemic diseases of the past?

2. In the nineteenth century, what did disease have to do with the will?

3. Why were nineteenth-century cancer patients believed to get cancer, and what advice might they be given?

4. Why was syphilis and its origin not mysterious?

5. In Chapter 5, what example does Sontag present of how cancer was viewed as a disease that caused a person to finally behave well?

6. How did the fantasies about TB in the nineteenth century relate to ideals of capitalist accumulation?

7. Before the tubercle bacillus was discovered, what did a standard medical textbook list as the causes of tuberculosis?

8. In The Magic Mountain how did tuberculosis affect Hans Castorp?

9. How were the conceptions of and treatements for TB patients and mental paitents similar?

10. What correlation did doctors see between cancer and complaints?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

There was a divergence in the metaphorical descriptions of TB and cancer. How did the metaphorical descriptions of TB and cancer diverge? How and why did technology create the divergence?

Essay Topic 2

Disease metaphors have been used to describe society and politics. How have disease metaphors been used to describe society and politics? What problems are there with using disease metaphors to describe society and politics?

Essay Topic 3

Sontag discusses a metaphor of repression. What is the metaphor of repression? How does that metaphor relate to TB and to cancer?

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