Abstract
Writing in 1978, Susan Sontag called cancer “a disease so overlaid with mystification, so charged with the fantasy of inescapable fatality”. Her classic essay Illness as Metaphor, written after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, chronicled the use of military metaphors in the language of cancer and its treatments: cancer cells invaded or colonised different parts of the body, and the remedy was equally violent: aerial bombardment (radiotherapy) and chemical warfare (chemotherapy). Although radiotherapy and chemotherapy are still staples of cancer treatment today, and military metaphors still lurk in the language of the disease, since Sontag's time, a completely new language and way of thinking about cancer has emerged, much of it emanating out of the networks of biomedical research and practice.
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