Sollte jeder Arzt gelesen haben, in einer Zeit, in der alles unter dem Stern medizinischer Ratlosigkeit und Romantisierungsversuchen als ›psychosomatisch‹ eingestuft wird: von Rheuma über Asthma zu Allergien, Arthritis und Tinnitus. Susan Sontag, die mehrmals an Krebs erkrankt ist, zeigt auf, dass es sich bei Theorien, die Krankheit als Metapher für persönliches Fehlverhalten begreifen, um punitives Victim Blaming handelt. Dass wir in einer Gesellschaft leben, die mit Krankheit und Tod nicht mehr umzugehen vermag und die jene Krankheiten, indem sie sie als ›selbstgemacht‹ ausweist, in ihrer Bedrohlichkeit zu neutralisieren versucht.
Susan Sontag - Illness as metaphor
Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. I want to describe, not what it is really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and to live there, but the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation: not real geography, but stereotypes of national character. My subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. My point is that illness is
not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness –– and the healthiest way of being ill––is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one's residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. It is toward an eludication of those metaphors, and a liberation from them, that I dedicate this inquiry.
Two diseases have been spectacularly, and similarly, encumbered by the trappings of metaphor: tuberculosis and cancer. The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious––that is, a disease not understood––in an rea in which medicine's premise is that all diseases can be cured. Such a disease is, by definition, mysterious.
With the advent of Christianity, which imposed more moralized notions of disease, as of everything else, a closer fit between disease and "victim" gradually evolved. The idea of disease as punishment yielded the idea that a disease could be particularly appropriate and just punishment.
In the nineteenth century, the notion that the disease fits the patients' character, as the punishment fits the sinner, was replaced by the notion that it expresses character. Disease can be challenged by the will.
Recovery from a disease depends on the will assuming "dictatioral power in order to subsume the rebellous forces" of the body.
