Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

By: Susan Sontag

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's Summary

In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as “one of the most liberating books of its time”. A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is - just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment, and it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed.

Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

©2013 Susan Sontag (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

fantastic

This should be mandatory reading for anyone in the healthcare industry and anyone who could ever get sick.

An essential work from an essential thinker

The power we give to our diseases, and how that power is redistributed to our institutions, should be on the forefront of everyone's mind after a deeply polarizing pandemic experience in the modern day. The doomsday feelings Sontag expresses in the 80s surrounding the AIDS epidemic & nuclear war, are felt even more intensely 40 years later.

Excellent Book!

The author did a great job of thoroughly explaining some of the metaphoric roots of stigma around the world’s major disease epidemics. It also is very much applicable to the current climate with the pandemic and the racial, classist, and ableist implications of disease stigma.