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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. At what medical school did Dr. Caroline Bedell Thomas work?

2. When did Rene and Jean Dubos write The White Plague?

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

4. Who believed that Mansfield became preoccupied with trying to heal her soul and abandoned other treatments?

5. Where did Drs. Claus and Marjorie Bahnson practice?

Short Essay Questions

1. What did Kant say about passion and cancer?

2. What was Menninger's view of illness, and how does Sontag criticize that view?

3. What did Katherine Mansfield think made her sick, and how did John Middleton Murry critique her thoughts?

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

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

6. How did the contrast between passions change according to Sontag in Chapter 6?

7. In Death in Venice, how did disease affect Gustav von Achenbach?

8. How was disease viewed by the Greek in Chapter 6?

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

10. Why was syphilis and its origin not mysterious?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Some metaphors for TB and cancer were taken from economics. What metaphors for TB and cancer were taken from economics? Is economics a more apt metaphor for TB or for cancer?

Essay Topic 2

Culture and psychology were used to explain illness. How were culture and psychology used to explain illness? What did psychologizing disease seem to provide? What did it seem to undermine?

Essay Topic 3

Juxtaposition is a literary device used to compare and contrast things and concepts. How does Sontag use juxtaposition to compare concepts, especially in Chapter 5?

(see the answer keys)

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