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, Wilhelm Reich; and Georg Groddeck, that odd contemporary of Freud's who wrote The Book of the It. Both men were, of course, brilliant eccentrics, but Sontag writes as if the intellectual community took their opinions on these subjects with great seriousness.
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