Battling Breast Cancer

Abstract

In 1978 writer Susan Sontag published her now famous essay, Illness as Metaphor, detailing, she explained, what it really like to emigrate to kingdom of ill and live there, rather the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation, physical illness itself but uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. Maintaining that tendency to rely on metaphors to discuss illness and disease was widespread in American culture, Sontag hoped through her essay to provide both an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them. Herself a cancer patient, Sontag argued for abandonment of metaphors in relation to disease and illness. My point, she declared, is that illness not a metaphor, and that most truthful way of regarding illness-and healthiest way of being ill-is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Having identified Americans' attachment to metaphor in their consideration of disease, Sontag urged them to abandon this approach, citing damage such metaphors caused in experiences of cancer patients.' Historians were quick to agree with Sontag's suggestion of power of metaphors in American thinking about disease and medicine, and since her path-breaking work many scholars have explored important role played by metaphorical thinking in shaping history and contemporary experience of disease. This work has been part of a much broader evolution in history of medicine. Since 1970s history of medicine has absorbed many of sweeping changes affecting historical discipline more generally. An earlier focus on great leaders of medicine and a tendency toward hagiography has been replaced by a field diverse in both its subjects and its methodologies. Two trends in particular have wielded profound influences on field. First, work of social historians has ensured that many of previously voiceless have become meaningful actors in history of medicine. From female physicians to patients and their families, social historians have acknowledged agency of those once absent from, or