"Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance"
About this Quote
Mystery plus powerlessness is a perfect incubator for meaning. Sontag’s line skewers a recurring cultural reflex: when medicine can’t give us clean causes or reliable cures, we recruit symbolism to plug the gap. The “awash in significance” phrasing is doing sly work. It suggests not a careful search for truth, but an overflow, a flooding - excess interpretation pouring over the patient until the illness becomes less a biological event than a moral narrative.
The intent is corrective, even disciplinary. Sontag is warning that murky causality invites story-making, and story-making quickly becomes judgment. If a disease can’t be neatly traced, the imagination steps in with blame: lifestyle, character, desire, contamination, weak will. If treatment is ineffectual, the stakes rise; metaphors start offering a counterfeit control. People can’t cure the body, so they try to “read” it, as if decoding the illness could restore order.
The context, of course, is Sontag’s broader project (most famously in Illness as Metaphor): stripping diseases of the moral and political mythologies that stick to them - cancer as repression, TB as romantic sensitivity, later AIDS as deviance and punishment. Her subtext is that significance is not neutral. It is an instrument. Institutions, media, and even loved ones use the fog around a disease to enforce norms, to manage fear, to separate the “innocent” sick from the “guilty” sick.
The bite of the sentence is its quiet accusation: the more medicine fails, the more culture talks - and the talking can wound.
The intent is corrective, even disciplinary. Sontag is warning that murky causality invites story-making, and story-making quickly becomes judgment. If a disease can’t be neatly traced, the imagination steps in with blame: lifestyle, character, desire, contamination, weak will. If treatment is ineffectual, the stakes rise; metaphors start offering a counterfeit control. People can’t cure the body, so they try to “read” it, as if decoding the illness could restore order.
The context, of course, is Sontag’s broader project (most famously in Illness as Metaphor): stripping diseases of the moral and political mythologies that stick to them - cancer as repression, TB as romantic sensitivity, later AIDS as deviance and punishment. Her subtext is that significance is not neutral. It is an instrument. Institutions, media, and even loved ones use the fog around a disease to enforce norms, to manage fear, to separate the “innocent” sick from the “guilty” sick.
The bite of the sentence is its quiet accusation: the more medicine fails, the more culture talks - and the talking can wound.
Quote Details
| Topic | Health |
|---|---|
| Source | Attributed to Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978). |
More Quotes by Susan
Add to List
