Culture April 28, 2020

The cultural critic Susan Sontag’s classic Illness as Metaphor emerged from her rage at seeing, after her own cancer diagnosis, “how much the very reputation of this illness added to the suffering of those who have it.” In 1978, Sontag contended with cancer’s reputation as scourge, invader, predator, demonic pregnancy, demonic enemy, barbarian within. Cancer’s roots were then imagined, at least in part, as psychological, resulting from repressed emotion. These metaphoric conceptions of cancer saddled its sufferers with shame and prevented many from seeking proper treatment or even knowing their diagnosis. A decade later, in AIDS and Its Metaphors, Sontag