When Susan Sontag was suffering from breast cancer in the 1970s, she came to the realization that how we choose to talk about
the disease shapes our perception of illness. In contemporary times, sickness has taken on a vocabulary that mimics military language. When one hears about a disease, particularly cancer, one also hears phrases like combating cancer, or waging war against cancer. Instead of describing the disease in scientific or medical terms, we describe cancer as advancing on parts of the body like an invading army.
There are several things that happen when we make
metaphors out of disease. First, it dehumanizes the
patient. The patient takes on the status of victim or survivor (depending on the outcome), making the patient less than human. In our great fear of disease, the patient also takes on the feared status of a capital-O-other much like victims or survivors of combat.
Most importantly, though, we fail to see illness for what it really is: a naturally occurring phenomenon that is part of everyday life. Humans, viruses, bacteria, and rogue cells have lived together for millions of years, and everyone gets sick at some point in time or another. Unfortunately, in our unwillingness to accept the inevitable, we have classified being sick as being in an abnormal state of existence.
AIDS and Its Metaphors functions as a follow-up or companion piece to Illness and Its Metaphors. In light of the AIDS epidemic that came to light in the late 1980s, Sontag decided to expand upon her original thoughts about illness. In the late 1980s and 1990s, HIV/AIDS became the cancer of the 1970s in that it replaced cancer as society’s most feared and stigmatized disease. Much like enemy nations we go to war against, AIDS patients were blamed for aberrant behavior simply by contracting a dangerous illness no one really knew much about at the time.
These essays are part of the long intellectual legacy that Sontag left when she died from leukemia earlier this year at the age of seventy.