Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

Drawing on her own experience of cancer treatment, Susan Sontag’s 1978 essay Illness as Metaphor compares how tuberculosis and cancer were imagined, and how both were tied to the patient’s character, as if repressed feeling could cause disease. She argues that the most truthful way to think about illness is without metaphor, which only shames and silences the sick. This edition adds AIDS and Its Metaphors, her 1989 sequel on the language that grew up around the AIDS epidemic.