Summary

In the final chapter of "Illness as Metaphor," Sontag focuses on political metaphors surrounding illness. She claims that, since ancient times, writers have used illness as a metaphor to attack what they perceive as political problems. For example, Shakespeare wrote about vague illnesses infecting the ‘body politic’ of England (72). By the Romantic period, however, illness was leveraged as a more specific metaphor by writers who wanted to claim that society – and particularly the city – was repressive. For example, the need for travel as a cure for tuberculosis functioned as a metaphor for the social corruption and ‘illness’ associated with the city. During the nineteenth century, doctors often recommended that tuberculosis patients travel away from the city and into nature. Sontag points out that authors, doctors, and commentators recommended various different travel destinations with different climates, belying their rationale that a temperate climate was the...