Illness as metaphor ; and, AIDS and its metaphors

✍ Scribed by Sontag, Susan

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 183
• Edition: 1st Picador USA ed
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is—just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed.
Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a 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...

✦ Subjects

AIDS (Disease) -- Social aspects. Metaphor. Tuberculosis in literature. Cancer in literature. Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. Medicine in Literature. Neoplasms. Tuberculosis.