Before The War on Cancer

This paper explores how gangsters and cancers came to be metaphors of bodily and social disorder, beginning in a media world dominated by print, radio and film and ending in a world where television had come to displace older forms of mass communication. It is a study of the continuities and discontinuities between concerns about television and earlier forms of mass media, and how they shaped the trajectories of the two metaphors of cancer and the gangster. Indeed, I suggest that in the case of these metaphors, anxieties about whether print, film, and radio were polluting or purifying were later extended and adapted to television, and may have contributed to the different fates of the two metaphors. The metaphor of the gangster as applied to cancer faded from public view in the 1970s, while the metaphor of cancer applied to gangsterism seems to have had a longer life.