Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

220 Forbidden Words
the euphemisms died after a prolonged illness / a long battle against illness
are still fairly common for someone who has died from cancer. Despite the
fact that died suddenly should often be interpreted as died from a heart attack,
the taboos on mentioning heart disease are nothing like so strong as those on
naming cancer. The reason for the different linguistic treatment of cancer and
heart disease cannot lie in the mortality rate, because heart disease easily
outstrips cancer as the commonest cause of death in so-called ‘advanced’
nations today. Despite its reputation, most cases of cancer are not, in fact,
terminal. The reason for the very different linguistic treatment must lie
elsewhere.
There is a distinction made between so-called preventable cancers – those
linked to lifestyle choices such as smoking, (unprotected) sun-baking, unhealthy
diet, over-eating, lack of exercise – and those which apparently are
not, such as breast cancer and mesothelioma. The image of cancer is very
much that of a latent malignancy which, even after treatment, is ready to
strike again. Of course, there are some cancers that do not remain hidden.
Lumps can appear on the body, tissue wasting can become apparent, there
may be unpleasant discharges, some cancers distort normal excretory functions,
therapy can be mutilative. Chemotherapy is toxic and has side effects
such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, hair loss, even sepsis and bleeding. All
these frightful symptoms and effects serve to strengthen the lay public’s view
of cancer as a contamination and perhaps, to some minds, the wages of sin –
just the kind of evaluation once given to leprosy. We may no longer believe,
as the medievals did, that the cancer patient is invaded by a deadly crab-like
demon; yet attitudes are reminiscent of the sort of dread and superstition that
attended disease during the Middle Ages.
Concealing a cancer diagnosis, particularly if it involves incurable cancer,
was once common practice 39 – ostensibly to spare the feelings of the patient,
but perhaps also to spare the doctor, who can find these situations as perturbing
as the patient. The cancer diagnoses of American Presidents Grover
Cleveland and Lyndon Johnson were not disclosed to the public; and the
mooted malignancies of both George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt
have never been publicly confirmed nor disconfirmed. Only since the 1970s
has it become usual for patients to be told that they have cancer. 40 It is also
only relatively recently that authorities have overcome their reticence to use
the word cancer in the names of hospitals, clinics and special units for cancer
patients, preferring something like oncology instead (from the Greek onkos
‘mass’). In 1906, Charles Childe, the leading British expert in the disease at
the time, was prevented from using the word cancer in a book title, which
then became The Control of a Scourge. Even as recently as 1987, Patterson
writes that publishers tried to persuade him to drop cancer from the title of his
history of the disease, The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American