Summary

In a brief section prior to Chapter 1, Sontag lays out the premise and argument of her text. She begins by describing health and illness as two distinct “kingdoms” in which all people can retain “citizenship.” Her stated goal is to describe not the reality and geography of the kingdom of illness, but the “stereotypes of national character” which are constructed around it (3). In other words, she will describe the metaphors used by the non-ill to describe the ill. In order to argue against the use of metaphors to define illness, Sontag states that she first must identity and describe the specific metaphors that have been most commonly employed against the ill, and delineate their sources.

In Chapter One, Sontag narrows her focus to the two diseases which she will discuss throughout the book - tuberculosis and cancer. Her central argument is that...