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Social History of Medicine 2001 14(2):293-312; doi:10.1093/shm/14.2.293
© 2001 by Society for the Social History of Medicine
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Who's Afraid of Susan Sontag? or, the Myths and Metaphors of Cancer Reconsidered

BARBARA CLOW*

* Department of History, Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 3J5 E-mail: bclow{at}is.dal.ca

SUMMARY 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. Some scholars have critiqued her faith in the power of science to dispel the myths and metaphors of disease; others have pointed out that it is neither desirable nor possible to strip illness of its symbolic meanings. It has been my purpose to test Sontag's assumptions about the impact of cancer metaphors, to weigh her arguments against the experiences and attitudes embodied in patient correspondence, obituaries and death notices, medical and educational literature, and fiction. Popular and professional reactions to neoplastic diseases in both Canada and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century reveal that, while many North Americans regarded cancer as a dreadful affliction, the disease did not, as Sontag has argued, predictably reduce them to a state of silence or disgrace.

Keywords: cancer; culture; metaphor; Sontag; illness experience; North America


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