Corona Times: War or Journey?

Among the figures of speech used for responses to corona are the usual war ones often borrowed in medicine from the military, as in Trump’s “war against the invisible enemy” and Raab’s “fighter” (in reference to Boris Johnson when the latter was in hospital). Michael Skapinker recently commented in The Financial Times that the journey metaphors in use in the UK are better as they remove blame from the victim who may be seen as not having fought well enough to “defeat” the virus. Skapinker notes that war metaphors for illness have been criticised for decades: in 1978, the American writer Susan Sontag had warned that the battle approach could “assign to the ill the ultimate responsibility both for falling ill and for getting well”. Skapinker refers to the observation by Nottingham Professor Brigitte Nerlich that UK ministers are starting to use journey metaphors, implying cooperation, as in going “the extra mile”, “keep going”, and moving “beyond the peak”. Still, he notes that King’s College language specialist Tony Thorne believes that battle metaphors must not be disposed of altogether due to the need for national mobilization.

On this subject, Patrick Cox of The World radio program interviewed Seema Yasmin, who teaches medicine and journalism at Stanford University. According to Yasmin, war metaphors have been used in epidemics since at least the 1600s when Thomas Sydenham, a British physician, declared, “I attack the enemy within. A murderous array of disease has to be fought against, and the battle is not a battle for the sluggard.” Subsequently, Louis Pasteur spoke of “invading armies that lay siege to our bodies.” Then in the 1920s, cancer cells were referred to as anarchists or Bolsheviks, after which Richard Nixon waged his own “war on cancer” by signing the National Cancer Act of 1971.

Ian Buruma of The New York Times warns that there’s a long history of illness being used to inflame hatred and that we mustn’t let this happen with corona by calling it a “Chinese virus” or a “foreign virus”: “Nationalism should have no place in medical discourse. And medical language should never be applied to politics. Coronavirus isn’t Chinese or foreign; it is global. Blaming alien forces, whether in the name of God, or science or simple prejudice, is bound to make things a great deal worse.”