: Re: How can I portray body horror and still be sensitive to people with disabilities? Building on my answer in Proven psychological or scientific means of scaring people?, I'm working on a universal

@Sent2472441

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If you want to be PC, stick to symptoms of infectious diseases, where the sense of body horror would reinforce prevention and be justified as a mean towards avoiding contagion.

As the OP suggests, body horror is about body transformations that go in undesired directions. Thanks to evolution, and sometimes thanks to human activity, we have a very large pool of examples, for instance: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_congenital_disorders
The list is even longer if we consider diseases that can be acquired during the course of life, and human interventions such as prosthetics from centuries past, and some plastic surgery.

Political correctness is aimed at avoiding forms of expression that exclude or marginalize certain groups of disadvantaged people. There are however some groups of people that are necessarily excluded from normal interactions with the rest of society. These are people with very contagious and lethal diseases. For the normal, medically untrained individual, to be able to recognize the symptoms of such diseases and avoid them is actually a desirable goal.

I think that body horror that would play on the physical symptoms of these diseases would not just be politically correct, but also desirable as a mean toward a form of contagion prevention. In addition, our mind is probably tuned to feel disgust and horror towards the most obvious of such symptoms. Even more so, it would be natural to feel very scared after finding such sings on one own's body. Play on them, exaggerate them, make sure that your readers can feel the horror, and in a sense you'll be even doing a service to mankind.

Some examples, not for the faint of heart:

black plague,
Zygomycosis,
Certain fungal infections,
Peruvian warts, and
Syphilis, Smallpox & Co.

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