Reflection: Illness as Metaphor/AIDS and its Metaphors

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag compares how similarly people treated those diagnosed with cancer in the 1970's to those diagnosed with tuberculosis decades before.  In AIDS and its Metaphors, Sontag again makes a comparison between society's response to AIDS and cancer.  What stood out to me wasn't the metaphor or her point to "de-mythicize" the conception of disease, it was realizing how unified humans are and how we can't help but cycle our response to such events (7).  Sontag includes other authors' novels in her book, a character "refuses to say 'tuberculosis'" because it will quicken the effects of the disease or how just saying "'cancer' is said to kill some patients" faster (6).  In both examples, the diseases of two different times have become "taboo" in conversation.  The way people treated cancer patients is so similar to the way people treated tuberculosis patients were treated, even if the diseases are so different.  It shows how human, how flawed, people are.  What happens when we can't heal people of their sickness?  Fear them.  Confine them.  Alienate them.  As ridiculous as that sounds, humans can't help but reverting to the same answer every time.  Every time, we go through a cycle of judgments, stereotypes, superstitions, realizations, and understandings, as if we never learn.

xkcd: Seismic Waves