Jade Goody, Britain's most famous reality TV star after appearing on Big Brother in 2002, has become the first known victim of 'reality cancer'.

Every detail of her disease, every millimetre it has spread and each new ailment it has brought, have been offered up for public debate, gaze and consumption.

She was first diagnosed, in August last year, in front of the TV cameras (naturally) of the Indian reality TV show Big Boss. Then, under advice from that maestro of media publicity Max Clifford, she gave interviews to the tabloids. "I'm fighting for my life", the headlines screamed.

She allowed TV cameras to follow her as she received chemotherapy and her hair fell out. Today, with the revelation that her cervical cancer has spread to her liver, bowel and groin, and that she is unlikely to survive it, a columnist for the Scotsman wonders if "Jade will invite the cameras to her deathbed".

Well-to-do writers used to comment publicly about their cancer all the time

Rod Liddle at the Spectator described Goody as a "thick, coarse chav" whose cancer-as-publicity-stunt marked a "new low" in modern entertainment. What next, he asked: "I'm a Tumour, Get Me Out of Here?" Another writer said the on-air cancer diagnosis was "the lowest publicity stunt ever". These and other commentators all seem to be saying: 'When did cancer become an acceptable topic for TV revelations and newspaper front pages?'

I'll tell you when. It was in the 1990s, when it became positively respectable for well-to-do writers to comment publicly about their struggles with cancer.

A 'death column', as some referred to the genre, became almost de rigeur in the smarter papers. They won awards for their "openness" and "honesty".

In 1997, after being diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, the journalist Ruth Picardie began a popular column, 'Before I say goodbye', for the Observer.

John Diamond, first husband of Nigella Lawson, wrote a 'cancer column' for the Times about his "creeping demise". He won a prestigious What The Papers Say award and turned the columns into a book C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too, before his death in 2001.

The book was later turned into a play called A Lump in my Throat by the journalist Victoria Coren. It was much applauded by the theatre-going classes.

The Guardian obituary on Diamond said: "It was a horrible irony that the illness that eventually ended [his] life was also, professionally, the making of him." Ruth Picardie's sister, Justine Picardie, wrote about living in the "dull half-light of Ruth's fame [as a cancer sufferer]".

Jade Goody is not the first person, it seems, for whom a cancer diagnosis has stoked up some professional success. It's just that this "thick coarse chav" cannot write and so her story has been blabbed to television cameras and newspaper reporters instead.

When Kylie Minogue was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, the Guardian ran a long feature titled "Why Kylie's illness matters". Yesterday, a satirical website posted an article claiming that "Goody is to be made into a Chav Saint when she finally succumbs to her much-publicised illness".

So we have a 'cancer divide' in Britain today. Respectable, liberal-minded journalists have drawn an implicit distinction between 'chic cancer', of the kind suffered by Picardie, Diamond and Minogue, and 'chav cancer', of the kind suffered by Goody.

Yet Goody's public suffering is only the brute, logical conclusion to the middle-class transformation of disease into public property. Or, as the writer Decca Aitkenhead called it, "the pornography of death". ·