What does it mean to be ill? In episode 159 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss illness. They explore how illness has been mythologized, how it may alienate us from our bodies, and how it impacts social relationships. Is science the solution to the mythologization of illness, or is the scientific model of illness its own form of mythology? How should we conceptualize illness? Is it as a “deviation” from a norm? And if so, what norm? Finally, what can we learn about illness from a phenomenological approach that centers the patient’s first-person experience? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts think about the distinction between the mental and the physical in connection to illness and the intersection between mind and body in illness.
Works Discussed:
Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological
Havi Carel, Illness: The Cry of the Flesh,
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
SK Toombs, The Meaning of Illness: A Phenomenological Account of the Different Perspectives of Physician and Patient
Highlight: Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor
Susan Sontag famously argued that illness has often been mythologized and treated as metaphor, which then leads to dangerous and problematic consequences
She gives two main examples: tuberculosis and cancer
Before treatments were developed, they were both seen as arbitrary death sentences that essentially fell from the sky and could target anybody
The way we describe these diseases has important social consequences, like treating patients to be socially shunned and treated as contagious, even if the disease is not actually contagious
Another facet of Sontag’s argument is that fatal diseases are thought to be obscene
Our deepest fears become associated with disease
With tuberculosis, patients were thought to have a spiritual problem that caused them to contract it
