Keywords Cancer , Disease and Health , Epidemics , History of Medicine , Infectious Disease , Mental Illness , Public Health , Society , Tuberculosis Summary Sontag argues against the use of illness as metaphor. Tuberculosis and cancer serve as her two central examples of the human tendency to use metaphoric thinking about illness. Metaphoric thinking about TB declined in the early part of the 20th century as the disease succumbed to science and public health measures. Cancer has now become the predominant disease metaphor in our culture.
Cancer is considered a disease of repression, or inhibited passion.
The cancer sufferer characteristically suppresses emotion, which after many years emerges from the unconscious self as malignant growth. Sontag uses the 19th century view of insanity as another example of malignant metaphoric thinking, while metaphor related to syphilis was somewhat more benign. She concludes the essay with an eloquent prediction that, as we learn more about the etiology and treatment of cancer, its metaphorical system will die on the vine. Commentary This essay is provocative and astringent. Prickly ideas and metaphors leap from every page.