Illness as Metaphor

I return to this book again and again because I find it so smart about the metaphors that people use to talk about cancer. In particular, Sontag picks apart the war metaphors used to describe cancer and its treatment. When I worked in oncology as a nurse, I never talked about treating cancer as “war.” Cancer results from a genetic mistake that causes cells to grow and grow when they are supposed to die. My body is not a battlefield and thinking about myself that way is profoundly disempowering.

Susan Sontag’s thin, succinct classic, written while she was being treated for cancer, is a meditation on the terminology we use to describe health and illness. In brief, she argues that the metaphors and myths we use to describe disease-especially cancer, add to human suffering. She takes particular issue with the military metaphors that have completely captured today’s discourse. Cancer patients are expected to “battle the illness.” Cancer is an “invader,” an “enemy”, that “breaches” our body’s “defenses.” These metaphors seem completely normal, but they are peculiar to our time. Sontag’s book profoundly affected the way I think and talk… show more.