Summary

In Chapter 6, Sontag traces the development of the stigma surrounding illness. She draws on examples from multiple historical periods - Greek writers, to Christian writers, to the Romantics, to modern times.

First, disease was presented in the Iliad and the Odyssey – two classic Greek plays – as supernatural punishment, as demonic possession, and as the result of natural causes. After the Greek era, the rise of Christianity as a major world religion led to an increased moralization of disease. Disease during the Christian Middle Ages was viewed as punishment from God; sufferers were therefore stigmatized for their presumed sins. Here, Sontag points to the punishment of the protagonists in a fifteenth century poem, John Henryson’s “The Testament of Cresseid,” and an eighteenth-century novel, Les Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, to highlight the metaphorical role of illness as spiritual punishment.

In the nineteenth century...