Sontag's Illness as Metaphor is a message sent to us from someone who has sojourned in what she calls "the kingdom of the sick." It is not, however, a personal statement about what can be learned by living there; rather, it is a plea from the ill to the healthy for nondiscrimination against the citizens who live there—specifically those people who happen to be suffering from cancer. In a careful, scholarly, and yet passionate argument, the author compares our own century's most dreaded and feared disease with the 19th century's romantic (often fatal) malady, tuberculosis. (pp. 111-12)

Sontag also takes short quotations from other writers and poets—Blake, Lermontov, Dostoevsky—that appear to support the thesis that most people believe that a person's character is the source of his or her cancer. The only scientific authorities she introduces are the controversial psychoanalyst, inventor of the Orgone Box...