ABSTRACT
Introduction In her classic essay, Illness as Metaphor (1991), Susan Sontag examined the symbolic economies of disease in order to trace and yet disaggregate the inter-resonances of medical (scientific) discourse and common sense. In the dominant metaphors associated with illness-including for example military, criminological, capitalist and machine metaphors-Sontag intimately mapped what she identified as the conceptual and material preoccupations of modernity. In this context, language, and metaphor specifically, are revealed as mediators of the historically contingent and reciprocal investments between medical scientific discourse and broader cultural processes and meanings. In this reading, illness as metaphor not only articulates the cultural situatedness of science and medicine but implicitly posits them as sites of both cultural agency and cultural authorship.
