Sontag - Illness As Metaphor

Al Qaeda and its extremist allies are a cancer
that risks killing Pakistan from within.

- President Obama, Friday March 27, 2009

I like books like Susan Sontag's Illness As Metaphor that change the way you see or think about the things you encounter every day.

I would clump it together with Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Margaret Visser's Much Depends on Dinner, Witold Rybczynski's City Life, and Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress as a book that tries to remind you that every idea you assume is simply a natural fact of life, or basic common sense, or some sort of eternal truth actually has a history and a context and fundamentally shapes the way you understand the world (and possibly yourself) in very specific ways.

Sontag's book is a pre-AIDS era look at how illnesses like cancer and tuberculosis have been used, and often understood, as metaphors. The book is well-written and insightful, but like most qualitative social science (is that the right phrase? anti-positivist? interpretive?) it is probably vulnerable to criticism that Sontag came up with an overarching thesis first and then cherry-picked references from literature, medical journals and news reports that would support her argument, ignoring those that contradicted it.

Still, the book helps unpack how we as a society tend to see illness and the seriously ill. It does a good job of starting to peel back the layers of our "instinctive" response to illness. There was a lot in these pages that I recognized in myself and in others. It's a sort of revelatory experience to have someone pull together several disparate threads and make you see what you were previously blind to. I wonder what kind of reputation this book has in academia?