A short study of how literature perceives illness, written by Sontag when she was a cancer patient herself. Because it's relatively short, her focus is less illness than disease, and less disease than specific diseases - consumption and cancer. (There's also some reference to syphilis, but this is comparatively minor, surprisingly - I would have thought there'd be a lot of references to syphilis in literature worthy of exploration.)

Sontag argues that both consumption and cancer have become somewhat mythologised; that built up around each is a network of metaphor and expectation. What's strange, reading this some 40 years after it was written, is how familiar the consumption narrative seems, and how alien (some of) the cancer narrative appears in comparison. Yet popular understanding of cancer has changed dramatically over the decades, so this shouldn't be surprising. Some of Sontag's conclusions aren't particularly convincing - while I appreciate that clarity is needed in talking about disease, metaphors actually increase clarity for some people, I think, and naturally as a writer myself I see them as a useful communicative tool. But for all that it's a fascinating little book, very easy to digest, and excruciatingly well-read.