Illness as Metaphor
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First published in 1978, Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor is a fierce and lucid examination of the stories we tell about disease, and the burden those stories place upon the people who suffer from it. Moving between literature, cultural history and medical thought, Sontag traces the romantic associations of tuberculosis in the nineteenth century and the fear, shame and moral judgement that came to surround cancer in the modern age. She reveals how illness, far from remaining a physical condition, has repeatedly been turned into a symbol of hidden desires, personal failings and social corruption. Her argument is both precise and deeply humane: the metaphors attached to disease can compound suffering by making patients feel responsible for their own afflictions.
Written with the intellectual force and moral clarity that define her wider work, Illness as Metaphor challenges readers to reconsider the language through which we understand the body, vulnerability and mortality. Sontag’s scrutiny extends from the novels of Thomas Mann and Charles Dickens to the cultural assumptions embedded in everyday speech, exposing the uneasy relationship between imagination and fact. The book emerged from her own experience of cancer, lending its argument a particular urgency without diminishing its analytical rigour. A landmark of twentieth-century cultural criticism, it remains an influential intervention in debates about illness, stigma and the ethics of representation, and a compelling example of Sontag’s conviction that language shapes the way we live.
From the book
“Illness is not a metaphor.”
— Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
On Illness as Metaphor
“One of the most liberating books of its time.”
— Newsweek