Cancer In The U.S.: An Extended Metaphor

Cancer is the twentieth century disease. If not in scientific fact, then surely in the fear-ridden depths of our imagination, cancer seems to be the special nemesis of our age. President Eisenhower’s politically dramatic heart attack created a journalistic image of this disease that for a while seemed to challenge the hold of its older rival, cancer, in the popular imagination. Dr. Paul Dudley White’s tough but optimistic face is part of that image which, on the whole, is a surprisingly beneficent one. But the sober scientific facts are less important than the attitudes they evoke. We tend to think of heart-disease as one thing: it strikes one organ, it always produces more or less the same effects, it seems a commonsensical disease, uncomplicated, unmysterious, and rational. Above all, rational—in the sense in which we make the most sense out of the idea of rationality, the Aristotelian cum Franklin notion of the golden mean. We can understand the dangers of excess, and though we may choose to ignore the golden mean, we do this knowing full well that we must pay a price for too much. Heart-disease seems to be such a price.

From the therapeutic point of view it is what we do not know about cancer that is so...