Illness As Metaphor

One historical and cultural trend that Sontag traces throughout the text is the aestheticization of illness. Another way of putting this is how diseases codify into an image or take on a life outside of the medical field and outside the direct relationship between patient and illness. Sontag makes the case for this phenomenon clearly with tuberculosis through myriad testimonials and writings from authors, poets, and playwrights. For example, Henry David Thoreau writes, “Death and disease are often beautiful, like…the hectic glow of consumption [another term for TB]” (20). The term aestheticization is often, for Sontag, a synonym or lead-in to the romanticization of a disease. Again, this can be seen in the way TB was understood culturally. Not only were its victims thought of as being soulful, poet, and melancholic, but it had a direct bearing on the fashion and look aspired to by the aristocracy, among whom, into the 20th century, it was fashionable to look pale and gaunt like a tubercular.

The aestheticization and romanticization of TB is for Sontag, “the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as an image” (29). Tracing this development serves an important function to Sontag’s overall argument.