Infectious Wit: Metaphor, Atheism and the Plague in Eighteenth-Century London

Abstract

In Illness and Self in Society, Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret remark the correspondences between the "biological and the social order. Everywhere and in all periods, it is the individual who is sick, but he is sick in the eyes of his society, in relation to it, and in keeping with the modalities fixed by it. The language of the sick thus takes shape within the language expressing the relations between the individual and society." 1 In short, illness both creates metaphor and is defined by it. Susan Sontag has revealed the matrix of metaphorical significations linking cancer and tuberculosis with the conditions of modern life. But cancer and TB are not the only diseases that have functioned historically in this metaphorical fashion. Herzlich and Pierret point out that: