Sontag makes a tightly packed argument about the ways in which illness has simultaneously been romanticised and placed on the patient making them the cause of their own illness, when they should be the seen as the victim. She uses the case studies of Tuberculosis and Cancer to argue the different ways in which they have been seen as illnesses which certain personality types are prone to. She ties this nicely to the way in which they are (or in the case of TB were) so mythologized being due to th...

I reread this for first time since 1970s in the middle of my own challenges last year.Sontag is clear in writing about health speech, or ill health comparisons.God bless and keep her.Highly recommended.

Susan Sontag is angry, and that comes across in this somewhat disturbing essay, where she writes not so much about actual illness, but about the use of illness as a figure or metaphor. She is particularly concerned with the metaphorical sue of tuberculosis in the 19th century and cancer in the 20th. Sontag's evidence for attitudes about tuberculosis is taken from 19th-century novels and operas, where Sontag says that the most truthful way for regarding illness is the one most purified of metapho...

Mukherjee quoted from this book so many times in The Emperor of All Maladies that I decided to read it. Sontag is an overanalyzing intellectual – that I knew and was prepared for it, but I still didn’t really get this book. She cites tuberculosis an example of an old disease that was laden with myth and metaphor. It was considered the illness of the artist, brought upon by too much passion and sensuality. It was almost cool to catch it. That may have been so. But then Sontag moves to the present...

I read this when it was first published and I was in my mid-twenties. A lot of what she said about cancer & illness & health really resonated with me; my mother died of cancer when I was 11 and I’d known other people who had also died of cancer. But, society has changed quite a bit since then, in a positive way, so I’m not sure how much the material in here is still applicable. But, at the time, it seemed powerful and insightful.

Published in 1978, “Illness As Metaphor” testifies to attitude towards cancer patients and it brings out a specific history of aversion through examples from literature and philosophy. Although a progression from pure psychological prejudgment to accurate scientific improvement in cancer treatment has certainly been made since 1978, this book retains its topicality.The study exposes insightful analogy of two different illnesses, exploring the boundaries of their broader cultural and historical f...

I have owned the highly influential critic, novelist and activist Susan Sontag’s Illness of Metaphor almost since it was published in 1978, but never read it until I got sick with some melanoma recently, the first real time I have ever been “sick” in the serious sense, and even then, not as sick as so many with other, more invasive or vicious cancers. And I knew this book focused on cancer. Sontag died in 2004 of leukemia, at 71, after her mother died of cancer in 1986.This is an essay I will us...

Recently, I was listening to someone evoke Sontag as they described their Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as purely and only a medical illness, resistant to metaphorical or symbolic conceptions of the disorder. And so I decided to read the essay with this specific lens in mind: Whereas Sontag's emphasis in this essay is physical illness (cancer and tuberculosis), I was most interested in attempting to stretch this same paradigm to understand mental illness.*Despite the trillions of dollars spent o...

Sontag, a cancer survivor at the time, wrote Illness as a Metaphor to explore and elucidate the metaphors used to describe serious illnesses like cancer and tuberculosis. Sontag argues that the metaphors and mythology created around these diseases make them seem evil and mysterious and very much like invincible predators, and hence sometimes prevent people from believing in conventional treatment to cure them. In addition, since cancer is seen as obscene, repugnant to the senses, and ill-omened,...

I only finished this in the wee hours of this morning--I need to reflect but I want to capture my first impressions & understandings. Sontag traces the language we use to discuss tuberculosis and cancer, with the former often referred to in romantic/aesthetized terms. In the case of both cancer and TB, Sontag argues, society has a notion that a type of personality is particularly prone to the illness, that the illness reveals something about the self and thus it can be cured if only the patient

In this 1978 work that somewhat reads like a recital of the history of metaphors for - but also using - illnesses like tuberculosis, syphilis and cancer, Sontag warns the reader against the possible detrimental consequences of using illness imagery in an effort to increase political gain. By, for example, using them in a warfare context. “[…] a good metaphor for paranoids, for those who need to turn campaigns into crusades”. An interesting read that in places feels inevitably outdated, partly du...

In 1978, when Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor , a classic work, she was a cancer patient herself. But in spite of that, it is not a book about being ill or about the travesties of being a cancer patient. In Sontag's words, it is 'not what it is really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and live there, but the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation'.Her subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of the various diseases as a figure or metaphor f...

First published as an 87-page monograph in 1978, Illness as Metaphor critiques the dehumanizing myths and metaphors associated with the most infamous illnesses of modernity: TB in the nineteenth century, cancer in the twentieth. As always, Sontag reads as brusque and provocative. Paradoxically, though, the writer spends much time surveying and revisiting the many facets of her field of study. Her argumentation is characterized by digression, repetition, and detour instead of the sequential devel...

“But how to be morally severe in the late twentieth century? How, when there is so much to be severe about; how, when we have a sense of evil but no longer the religious or philosophical language to talk intelligently about evil? Trying to comprehend “radical” or “absolute” evil, we search for adequate metaphors. But the modern disease metaphors are all cheap shots. The people who have the real diseases are also hardly helped by hearing their disease’s name constantly being dropped as the epi

There’s really not a lot of point in my reviewing this book when Riku has already done such a wonderful job here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... His review is infinitely more comprehensive than this one will be.Still, I just want to say that I really did enjoy this. I particularly liked the idea that the metaphors for TB and cancer are so differently understood in our culture. I was particularly struck by the idea that cancer is a kind of hardening of cells and that TB is a kind of liqu...

Sontag argues that a certain ideological cruelty resides in the metaphors commonly used to describe cancer and other illnesses. And when we let go of the metaphors, we can free ourselves (and those who are ill) from the tyranny of superstition, an over-excited imagination and blame. On a personal level, I get this. She's suffered; we've all suffered or known others who've suffered. And on page 101, she says that her aim is to "alleviate unnecessary suffering." On the same page, she also says tha...

Herein, Sontag presents an excising polemic on the use of cancer and tuberculosis as metaphors of evil in (respectively) the Romantic and industrialized eras of modern society. Unfortunately, this diatribe is neglectful of non-Western cultures and carries a certain sense of an overly-personal motive. Sontag grasps desperately at every little data point in history suggesting at her thesis. As a result, the author repeatedly rehashes concepts with a frequency that is tiring for a mere 85-page nove...

The book could easily pass off as a work of master autoethnographer. Angry at times, the book is mostly nonchalant. Given the fact, her own experience with cancer does not get featured in this monograph, and the prose posits itself as an objective essay, I reserve that initial thought to myself.There are few observations which felt like contrivances to make her point (especially the cancer portions a bit). Few instances appeared to be surreptitiously personal (though the tone is objective throug...

This is so interesting, I can't believe it took me so long to get around to reading it. I started reading it after a day and a half of having being shut in my room with a cold, not really seeing anyone and feeling kind of dramatic. And it was really soothing. The stuff about cancer as metaphor for middle class repression and emotional restraint made me think a lot about people I know with potentially fatal/terminal/incurable illnesses who have gone on the Gawler diet or similar; my mum and her p...

3.5/5I wished I had taken notes so I can better articulate my thoughts, but essentially I found it an enlightening read that I'm glad to have absorbed.Sontag brings up some valid points about the way we regard diseases, especially tuberculosis and cancer. I haven't before viewed how often literature likens TB to be an affliction deeply connected with the person and his/her creative faculties instead of it just simply being an ailment.She dives deep into how writers often romanticize TB but dispa...