(C)
The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease
thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which
medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured. Such a disease is, by definition,
mysterious. For as long as its cause was not understood and the ministrations of doctors remained so
ineffective, TB was thought to be an insidious, implacable theft of a life. Now it is cancer’s turn to be
the disease that doesn’t knock before it enters, cancer fills the role of an illness experienced as a
ruthless secret invasion—a role it will keep until, one day, its etiology becomes as clear and its
treatment as effective as those of TB have become.
Although the way in which disease mystifies is set against a backdrop of new expectations, the
disease itself (once TB, cancer today) arouses thoroughly old-fashioned kinds of dread. Any disease
that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally,
contagious. Thus, a surprisingly large number of people with cancer find themselves being shunned
by relatives and friends and are the object of practices of decontamination by members of their
household, as if cancer, like TB, were an infectious disease.
Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence,
but because it is felt to be obscene—in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable,
repugnant to the senses. Cardiac disease implies a weakness, trouble, failure that is mechanical; there
is no disgrace, nothing of the taboo that once surrounded peoples afflicted with TB and still
surrounds those who have cancer. The metaphors attached to TB and to cancer imply living processes
of a particularly resonant and horrid kind.
【題組】39. According to the passage, which of the following is true?
(A) Affliction with TB is concealed as a secret.
(B) In the past, patients afflicted with TB felt unashamed.
(C) TB and cancer used to be regarded as a taboo.
(D) TB and cancer are both infectious diseases.
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