Thoughts on Sontag's "Illness/AIDS as a Metaphor"

Susan Sontag’s novels Illness as a Metaphor (IAAM) and AIDS as a Metaphor (AAAM) illustrated her disposition towards certain lethal diseases.  In Sontag’s piece Illness as a Metaphor, she represented her view towards cancer.  Comparing it to tuberculosis, a lethal disease more common in the early 1900s, Sontag pointed out that having cancer alienated patients from everyone else.  The common view of people with cancer during the 1970s was that they were contagious, and that these people were sure to die.  Even doctors stigmatized these unfortunate patients by refusing to tell them that they were inflicted with cancer.  Basically, it was seen as the patient’s fault if they had cancer due to an ill-omen or unhealthy habits (again, this is during the 1970s). 

                In Sontag’s piece Aids as a Metaphor, written ten years after her first piece, she first analyzed IAAM by outlining the history of metaphors and the origins of science and disease, and then finally mentions AIDS.  She introduced AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) by describing how the disease affects the body.  Later, she compared AIDS to cancer; while cancer is a proliferation of mutated cells that adversely affect the body, AIDS breaks down the immune system, consequently destroying cells.  Though the two diseases are comparably different, Sontag noted that the response to the two diseases were very similar.  In both cases, people believed that the diseases were linked to certain groups of people (AIDS for homosexual men; Cancer for unhealthy people). Thus, she concludes that AIDS in the 1980s attracted the same malevolent attention as cancer did in the 1970s. 

                For the most part, I understood what Sontag wished to portray in her two pieces.  In her first piece IAAM, Sontag related that cancer patients in the 1970s were treated poorly by doctors and other members of society.  In AAAM, Sontag studied AIDS in the 1980s, and related its bad publicity to that of cancer in the 1970s.  The only thing that I did not understand was why Sontag found it beneficial to analyze IAAM in the first chapter of AAAM, written ten years later.  Personally, I think she should have written a follow up to her first piece instead of trying to incorporate it into her second.

                On the other hand, I liked how Sontag orchestrated her novels.  I found it very clever of Sonntag to relate a plethora of metaphors to illness in the beginning of AAAM.  For example, her allusions to the arts and the military were brilliant, and really added to her argument later on about the stigmatization of people with diseases such as AIDS or cancer.  I agreed with just about every metaphor she chose to use. Though I enjoyed her use of metaphors, I think that she could have curtailed this section, or at least made it a bit more interesting to read (most kids would find this section extremely boring) through simpler language or other forms of rhetoric.