Mark Senak’s post, “World AIDS Day: The Past Cannot Be the Future,” inspired me to write an epic comment about different perspectives on illness and care delivery, so I adapted and expanded it to share here:
I recently read Susan Sontag‘s two essays, “Illness as Metaphor” (about TB & cancer, published in 1977) and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” (published in 1988). Sontag’s opening lines about the “kingdom of the well” and the “kingdom of the sick” helped animate for me the experience of a newly diagnosed patient (who now can go online to talk with other pioneers, form posses, share maps, and better navigate).
She wrote the first essay when she was a cancer patient and discovered the outrageous truth:
In France and Italy it is still the rule for doctors to communicate a cancer diagnosis to the patient’s family but not to the patient…Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene — in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.
In 1988, vicious metaphors were springing up around the new “enemy” of HIV. As she writes: “Now the generic rebuke to life and to hope is AIDS.” Continue reading →
Peggy Orenstein‘s article, “Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer,” is worth one of your precious NYTimes.com chits (unless, of course, you’re a subscriber, in which case you have hopefully already devoured it).
