Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
By JJF
There are gypsy fortune-teller times, when life is played like cards of chance; and, how unfortunate when we are dealt that card of death in some form of illness or the other. Correct me if I am wrong but most people whose energies become depleted through sickness want to recruit all possible solutions to become well again. In so doing people usually solicit a higher authority (doctors) to put up a good fight for them. Susan Sontag attempts in her book, Illness Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors to provide patterns and nuances, changes and tendencies that should occur in societies’ good fight. Her informative writing, from a social contract point of view is the criteria for a revolutionary perspective and we get to realize from her research the many wrongs in the usage of metaphorical labeling of serious diseases. She exaggerates through a social philosophy that there is nothing worse than a sugar-coated fantasy explanation of a serious illness. In her reliable discovery she found in some pertinent yesteryear medical history longevity fantastical fallacies connected to mystifying the patient away from the ethics or the value theory of understanding a disease both on the individual and the community level. She provides readers wit persuasive proof of the doctors’ nonsense told to patience about the painful TB; the shameful cancer; the demeaning syphilis and the environmental cholera. For example, cancer is now voiced in a similar manner as the once dubious TB illness, “where no one knows anything and if they did, they would not tell you about it.” She explains that the professional medical spirit sadly had patients hear only a glossing over in metaphoric or symptomatic themes in (understated imagery) of the truth about their serious disease. She philosophically narrates a polemical cultural criticism about divine wrath or supernatural punishments often used to explain a less understood medical territory and one disguised in metaphorical cover ups because of additional dreadful dilemmas feared that would cost a family or patient much more harm if they understood the simple truth. The activity she writes is signified as a voice of reform that suggests the education of a long neglected condition. Susan Sontag argues for scientifically empirical information, not metaphorical inherited and unsatisfactory scientist of imagery doctors have come to identify the body sickness. This fantasy she claims proves nothing more than an obsolete and confusing attempt to relieve suffering. There are excellent investigations on these absurd descriptions and she was determined relate that only a misanthrope would appreciate such nonsense. Confusing the lack of values was a horrendous medical obstacle of intelligence not a well researched directive. These legendary reservations were an outdated cheap villainous frustration of some old medical school ideas that happily dealt nothing but cards of death.
In the second part of Sontag book, Aids and Its Metaphors, a descriptive piece of Social epistemology is presented on how the serious illness (Aids) has long been ignorantly reported. She enhances the need for an instructional process that will uses historical medicinal societal educations to complement a crusade against crippling miss comprehension that encourage incorrect labeling and defining of a serious malady. She points out man’s nature is orientated towards a particular body space (risk group) to describe social conflicts. The disease, Aids, that develops in stages is a social medical conflict. Sontag points out the reasons why we should not use metaphor to catalog perceptions intelligences of such foul diseases. She promotes the knowledge of a broad spectrum of inoculations that would begin a good effort to recognize the concerns of this unmanageable illness. She thinks initiation of formidable defense parameters through disclosures of meaningful antigenic stimulus on the plague, influenza, cholera and other bacteriological comparisons to aids, cancer and syphilis build in society’s mind creates defenses for developing new types of immune criteria that indirectly strengthen the awareness of the Aid virus. This is a preventive ideology, and suggests that a medical education for patients obtained through the study of case histories would help predict the spreading of many repressed evil epidemics.
