Nobody has partaken in such a zealous barrage of metaphoric lampoons since the nineteenth century days of multiple sclerosis, which was called in its early years, hysterical paralysis . After an extensive book tour that included talk show spots and supposed death threats that seemed to boost her public credibility, Showalter was named president of the prestigious Modern Languages Association. This seemed a startling accolade for a professor who based her own scholarship almost entirely on popular magazine articles, yet critiqued the way people mimic pop culture by embodying accounts of illness. The myopia of this fiscal distribution, in the face of an epidemic that could cripple the economy and public health, is astounding. It should be called the forever dead syndrome.
People react to such severity with disbelief.
I would argue that the debilitating nature of the symptoms creates the pervasive silence, paving the way for a mythology that has haunted the illness since its inception. Cannot be reprinted without permission.