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Illness As Metaphor Quotes

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Illness As Metaphor Quotes

“Illness is a story we tell about ourselves. The narrative is the connective tissue that joins together the symptoms and perceptions and makes sense of them. It's how impenetrable concepts like death and life become something that can be incorporated comfortably into day-to-day existence. A serious illness is much easier to cope with if it can be slotted into a familiar structure with a beginning, middle, and end. It's also why metaphors of battle or struggle are so popular for describing sickness. It draws the line between them and us, good and evil.”

MetaphorIllnessIllness As Metaphor
Book:A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety
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“But hypochondria is a plotless story, a deviation from the regular progression of an illness from stage to stage. Without a firm diagnosis for my unreliable symptoms, I am stuck in the first scene of the drama, endlessly looping around the first few lines of dialogue. The compulsion to narrativize this experience is always there, but always thwarted. The comfortable point at which to tell the story never arrives, because everything is always in present tense. No narrative structure can help those who never get to turn the page on the opening line.”

MetaphorIllnessTraumaNarrativeHealth AnxietyIllness As Metaphor
Author:Caroline Crampton
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“I wonder if the hypochondriac him or herself is a metaphor, a condensed node of ideas about illness crushed together into one individual. I am pressed between these layers of meaning like a flower preserved between the pages of a book, trapped in narratives about my sickness that have already been written.”

MetaphorIllnessNarrativeMeaningHealth AnxietyIllness As Metaphor
Book:A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria – A Revelatory Medical Memoir and Biography of Health Anxiety
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