Citation

Iwai Y, Khan Z, DasGupta S. Lit. Med. 2021; 39(2): 212-216.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Johns Hopkins University Press)

DOI

10.1353/lm.2021.0019

PMID

34897123

Abstract

"The war has changed,” declared an internal Center for Disease Control (CDC) document cited in The Washington Post on July 29, 2021.1 The Post article describes the CDC’s new guidance, including mask-wearing practices, as “a strategic retreat in the face of the delta variant.” Rather than framing the change in policy as proactive and logical scientific practice in the face of an evolving health threat, this language invokes all mitigation practices—including vaccinations, social distancing, and masking—as a militaristic “retreat.” The imagery is binary, one of victories and losses such that public health efforts, including masks, are associated with shame, if not outright defeat.

Military metaphors have long been ubiquitous in medicine. Chemotherapy “carpet bombs” cancer, doctors and nurses are “heroes on the front lines,” while disease, and oftentimes patients, become “the enemy.” Susan Sontag famously discussed the problems of this metaphorical language in Illness as Metaphor, and this framing has become even more dangerous in the COVID-19 pandemic.2 The authors of this essay previously discussed the dangers of the militaristic #healthcareheroes metaphor that emerged in the COVID-19 era.3 We examined how this metaphor became a call for self-sacrifice on the part of healthcare workers while they lacked essential personal protective equipment (PPE), and yet were celebrated with costly military flyovers. For us, military metaphors of healthcare heroism not only demanded self-sacrifice, and even death, but framed any critique of “fighting on the frontlines” as unpatriotic, such that physicians and nurses publicly discussing workplace safety and PPE shortages risked being seen as traitorous ...

Language: en