Metaphor on Germs

The use of war and invasion metaphors to talk about germs and infectious diseases creates an environment that labels the disease as an outside invader therefore associating diseases negatively with people who come from the outside, most predominantly immigrants. Throughout different periods in American history immigrants to the United States have been stereotypically associated with germs and infectious diseases. This association shines a negative light on immigrants and what they bring to the United States. Further, as Susan Sontag discussed the metaphor of a war on disease “implements the way particularly dreaded diseases are envisaged as an alien “other” as enemies are in modern war; and the move from the demonization of the illness to the attribution of fault to the patient is an inevitable one, no matter if patients are thought of as victims. Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggest guilt” (Sontag 11). The use of war to describe and understand disease automatically victimizes the patients of the diseases and therefore places guilt and shame upon them. This is incredibly detrimental to the way we understand sickness because it places blame on the sick and therefore causes them to feel that in some way their body has failed them and that is their fault. We feed into this mentality of guilt associated with being sick or having a condition that prevents one’s body from doing what it is supposed to do. Further, the emphasis on guilt causes people to not seek out treatment for the disease, further spreading the infection to others and doing more harm to the infected person because they are preventing themselves due to shame to the resources that could help them. I agree with Sontag that we must learn to understand diseases as just that diseases that do not carry any further meaning to the individual who contracts them.
Further, the fact that we as a society often associate victimization with guilt presents a serious problem with how we understand the concept of being a victim. Somehow we associate innocence with guilt. The more practical application of this problematic thinking is seen in the piece by Markel and Stern, "The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society." They discuss how throughout history various groups of immigrants to the United States "have been stigmatized as the etiology of a wide variety of physical and societal ills" (M&S 757). Laws like the National Origins Act and many others that prevent or restrict immigration to the United States have been perpetuated by the logic that places blames on the immigrants who are often the victims of disease. Other factors like the class and race of immigrants have played a large role in who is included and excluded from the United States and these factors continue to play a critical role in the immigration issues the United States faces. With this in mind though I think the perpetuation of blaming the victim of disease creates a detrimental mentality that falsely believes that it is okay to blame not only immigrants but people in general for things they cannot control.