Mars by Fritz Zorn

Author:Fritz Zorn [Zorn, Fritz]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1982-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

And Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy tale is defeated as soon as the queen can tell him that his name is Rumpelstiltskin. It’s similar with cancer. Since nobody dares to pronounce the word, it’s no wonder that we haven’t found a way to cure it yet. I have yet to meet a doctor who will say the word “cancer.” And since the doctors refuse to call the devil by his name, it’s only natural that they can’t exorcise him. Patients undergo endless operations and radiation treatments and swallow pills by the rod, but the most important part of the therapy gets left out. It’s common knowledge that not even cough syrup or cold tablets will work if the patient doesn’t believe in them. And if the patient does have faith in his medication, you can give him chalk tablets and he’ll still get better. But in all cancer therapy, the doctors retreat into silence. The result is that the patient loses faith in the treatment and therefore cannot be cured. But the doctors aren’t the only ones who refuse to talk about cancer. No one else will, either. The word is taboo. (My poor parents probably would have said that cancer was one of those “difficult” subjects.) In this way, the cancer patient is condemned to utter despair, and he dies of his despair.

This is why I feel that cancer is primarily a psychic disorder and that the various tumors should be regarded only as secondary, physical manifestations of the disease, for cancer clearly has all the characteristics of a mental illness. We’re allowed to talk about our colds or our flu, but we are not allowed to talk about our depressions. (I think people often get colds so that they can finally do some complaining without violating the rules of good behavior.)

Here, too, I feel my behavior conformed very well to the rules of society and the rules of cancer. I have been unhappy all my life, but since my good breeding told me it was “not nice” to complain about unhappiness, I never said a word about it. In the world I lived in, tradition demanded that I not create a disturbance or call attention to myself, no matter what the cost to me. I knew that I had to be correct and to conform; above all, I had to be normal. But normality as I understood it meant that I shouldn’t tell the truth but should be polite instead. I was a good boy all my life, and that’s why I got cancer. That’s the way it should be. Anybody who is a good boy all his life deserves to get cancer. It’s a just punishment for all that goodness.

I could have continued to be good and nice; I could have decided to pass out of the picture quietly without making any fuss. But I was spared that fate because I came to see that my disease— this familiar yet unmentionable and therefore devilish cancer that usually kills

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