Everyday Canvas

Literary Diseases: Plague, Consumption, Aids, and now?

I’ll get to literary diseases soon enough, but I really wanted to add to my earlier Ebola entry today.

Few days ago, I wrote that since I didn’t know enough, I was holding back judgment on Ebola. After the few incidents since then, let’s say, I am seriously concerned. It seems to me that what they told us about Ebola is wrong--that the only culprit is being in contact with bodily fluids of a patient. I think this, especially because health-care workers with all their gear have contracted the illness. I know and trust that nurses do wash their hands often and they are careful especially around communicable diseases. So that carelessness alibi doesn’t sit well with me. My guess is, this disease spreads in ways we can’t even think of, and thus, the worry.

Coming back to the literary diseases, there have been certain principles in using diseases in fiction, with TB or consumption taking the first place. Why?

TB took longer and was touchingly visual with the patient looking like a martyr through coughing of the blood, quality of the skin, and the hollowing of the eyes. When it was overly used, its origin or beginning was mysterious. Plus it had metaphoric possibilities, such as a young woman slowly wasting away while her family, partner or husband were experiencing the trauma. Then the medical community found ways of curing and preventing TB. So cancer became the next hot disease for fiction with Aids vying for the same spot.

What gets translated from the medical disease into literary disease is largely up to the writer, but the disease is only successful -–literary-wise—if the scientific basis for it is correct. Here, proper research shows its credentials again, which is the baggage real illnesses come with when used in fiction.

All things considered, a good(!) literary disease may be a mysterious one the writer can make up. Dickens has used this ploy well, by killing most of his characters with “fever.” His fever represents the harshness and randomness of life. In our day and age, however, how well can this be done with medical sciences finding a name to any discomfort? I guess, not too successfully.

But then, they haven’t really solved how Ebola spreads, have they? I sure hope, they do soon enough before we have another plague in our hands, literary or not.