FACTOID #53: If you thought Antarctica was inhospitable, think again - its land area is only ninety-eight percent ice. Reassuringly, the other 2% is categorised as "barren rock".
Illness as Metaphor is a nonfiction work written by Susan Sontag and published in 1978. She wrote it during her own fight against breast cancer and challenged the "blame the victim" mentality behind the language society often uses to describe diseases and those who suffer from them.
Drawing out the similarities between public perspectives on cancer (the paradigmatic disease of the twentieth century), and tuberculosis (the symbolic illness of the nineteenth century), Sontag shows how both diseases have become associated with personal psychological traits. In particular she demonstrates how the metaphors and terms used to describe both syndromes lead to an association between repressed passion and the physical disease itself. She notes the peculiar reversal that "With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer), the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease – because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses."
Susan Sontag argues that illness is not a metaphor and that the most truthful way of regarding illness - and the healthiest way of being ill - is to resist such thinking.
Her examples of metaphors and images of illness are taken from medical and psychiatric thinking as well as from sources ranging from Greek and Medieval writings to Dickens, Thomas Mann, Henry James, Frank Lloyd Wright, Auden and others.
Sontag states that our metaphors for Aids and its effects may be damaging; they suggest an apocalypse in personal and social terms, and therefore threaten not only the victims of the disease but all of society.
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, by Susan Sontag
Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.
These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professional and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.
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