B Clow
Susan Sontag's book, Illness as Metaphor, has framed our understanding of the relationship between disease metaphors and illness experiences in modern Western society. Her view that metaphors can render diseases socially as well as physically mortifying has influenced a generation of scholars: her conclusion that cancer sufferers are shamed and silenced by metaphors has likewise shaped public perception of neoplastic diseases. Despite the eloquence of Sontag's prose and the force of her convictions, her conclusions are not wholly persuasive...
August 2001: Social History of Medicine: the Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine