Illness as metaphor / Susan Sontag.

1st appeared, in an earlier version, in The New York Review of Books.

'The fantasies concocted around cancer, and around tuberculosis in earlier times, undergo close examination....Her subject is the unreal and often punitive uses of illness as a figure or metaphor in our culture. Her point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness--and the healthiest way of being ill--is to resist such metaphoric thinking....Her examples of metaphors and images are taken from medical and psychiatric thinking as well as from sources ranging from Greek and medieval writings to Keats, Dickens, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Henry James, Mann, Joyce, Mansfield, Frank Lloyd Wright, Auden, and many others in our own time.'

Hardcover