Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

by Susan Sontag

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character,

the cancer personality is regarded more simply, and with condescension, as one of life’s losers.

Psychologizing seems to provide control over the experiences and events (like grave illnesses) over which people have in fact little or no control.

Since then, military metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological “defenses,” and medicine is “aggressive,” as in the language of most chemotherapies.

Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one’s actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability.

was seeing how much the very reputation of this illness added to the suffering of those who have it.

Getting cancer, too, is sometimes understood as the fault of someone who has indulged in “unsafe” behavior—the

With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up.