Utopia

The motif of sickness, health, and medicine recurs throughout the novel, particularly in the lengthy discourses of Raphael, whose first name in Hebrew means “God has healed” (xii). As a cluster of metaphors, this motif offers an effective illustration of Raphael’s approach to social ills and their solution. In More’s day, the germ theory of disease was not yet prevalent. Instead, disease was explained by an imbalance of certain fluids (known as “humors”) within the body. Social problems are not merely the responsibility of individual actors but express an imbalance within a social system, just as disease was understood to reflect an imbalance within the human body.

In addition to illustrating Raphael’s interpretation of social maladies such as greed, poverty, oppression, and crime, the recurring metaphors of sickness, health, and medicine provide the reader a handy way of understanding how the Utopians solve the social problems they diagnose. Much like a doctor might try to eliminate the cause of disease rather than merely alleviating the symptoms, Utopians seek to eradicate social problems by abolishing the irrational and exploitive relationships that give rise to them.