**Susan Sontag's celebrated essays on cancer and AIDS now available in
one volume.
**
In 1978, 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.