Ebook: Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

In 1978, while recovering from cancer, Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, the celebrated essay on the invented and often punitive uses of illness in our culture. It has become a classic that Newsweek recently called "One of the most liberating books of its time." Her aim was to strip cancer of its symbolic stigma and show that it is only a disease. She argued that the most truthful way of regarding illness —and the healthiest way of being ill— is to resist such metaphoric thinking. It was not surprising that a decade later, after the advent of AIDS,
Sontag felt compelled to write a sequel that would counter the almost universal labeling of AIDS as a "plague." AIDS and its Metaphors aims to free both patients and panicked population from the tyranny of a set of meanings that stand not for medical reality, rather carry the burden of fears about the future. Now, for the first time, these two brilliant works are being published in one paperback volume. Brimming with humane and original ideas about disease and the modern condition, they are compassionate exhortations, a liberating event.

"Taken together, the two essays are an exemplary demonstration of the power of the intellect in the face of the lethal metaphors of fear." —The Nation