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Susan Sontag
Obituary
AP
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Susan Sontag She was a writer, leading American intellectual, and political activist. Born Susan Rosenblatt on Jan 16, 1933, in New York, NY, USA. She died of complications of acute myelogenous leukaemia, aged 71 years, on Dec 28, 2004, in New York, NY, USA. Most of Susan Sontag’s novels, nonfiction books, and essays in publications such as The New Yorker and The Times Literary Supplement did not involve health or illness in any direct sense. But it was two of her books—Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)—that made her highly influential among those interested in social medicine and in literature and medicine. “There is no work in anything broadly defined as social medicine that doesn’t cite very early on, often in the first paragraph, her work”, Rita Charon, director of the narrative medicine programme at Columbia University, New York, USA, told The Lancet. “It was a bell that you rang—in the same way that you ring Hippocrates and Osler, you now ring Sontag.” Wendy Parmet, professor of law at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA, commented that “There were medical sceptics who wrote before Susan Sontag”, citing Ivan Illych and Thomas Szasz. “If you think about earlier critiques if it’s not a biological phenomenon, it’s all about society creating a disease.” Sontag, however, did not deny the importance of biological processes and the medical approach, Parmet said. “She recognises that the disease has a simultaneous and equally important social reality that has its own importance but may have very little to do with the biological disease.” Sontag’s father died of tuberculosis in China when she was 5 years old, and her mother remarried a man named Sontag from whom she took her name. Her writings on illness were informed by her own experiences with breast cancer, which was diagnosed in 1978. “Although the way in which disease mystifies is set against a backdrop of new expectations, the 468
disease itself (once TB, cancer today) arouses thoroughly oldfashioned kinds of dread. Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious,” Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. AIDS and its Metaphors, inspired by the loss of several close friends to the illness, expanded the same arguments to AIDS. Parmet, who took part in the first case heard by the US Supreme Court on AIDS, was one of many legal scholars influenced by Sontag, whose work was cited in law reviews and legal briefs. Her work also helped to lead to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, Parmet told The Lancet. In 2003, Sontag published Regarding the Pain of Others, on the suffering of war. Later that year, she became a writer in residence at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, leading a seminar attended by physicians, nurses, social workers, medical students, and literary scholars from around the university. “She let us ultimately talk about our work at levels of meaning that far exceed, or go far deeper, than the kinds of talk that usually go on among doctors”, said Charon, who organised the seminar. “There was a group of psychiatrists, internists, paediatricians, and oncologists, talking in almost whispered terms of how these deaths affect us, how we endure. It was the kind of authentic talk among health care professionals that you would think would happen routinely, but is actually taboo.” Sontag’s work had its critics. Barbara Clow, of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, wrote in 2001 of Sontag’s view that “cancer sufferers are shamed and silenced by metaphors” that “despite the eloquence of Sontag’s prose and the force of her convictions, her conclusions are not wholly persuasive” (Soc Hist Med 2001; 14: 293–312). Charon noted that some of Sontag’s criticism of metaphors was perhaps interpreted too literally. “It became clear in the seminar that a lot of the ‘metaphor is bad kind of stuff’ for her was a form of posturing”, she said. “It was a form of bracing herself to marshal all her forces to get better. She didn’t want to waste time fussing and dawdling—she was so brave, she wanted any treatment, no matter how agonising or painful.” In 1989, on a book tour stop in New York City, Sontag was asked by an audience member what a physician or she would do without metaphor. “You live”, she answered, somewhat irritated, according to an account by Newsday. “You participate in your treatment, you have hope. Metaphor is a code word for misrepresentations, stupidities, false ideas. I’d say people would be better off without them.” But such metaphors do survive her, even if their power has been diminished by her work. She is survived by her sister, Judith Cohen, and a son, David Rieff, who for many years was her editor at publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Ivan Oransky [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 365 February 5, 2005
AP
Rights were not granted to include this image in electronic media. Please refer to the printed journal.
Susan Sontag She was a writer, leading American intellectual, and political activist. Born Susan Rosenblatt on Jan 16, 1933, in New York, NY, USA. She died of complications of acute myelogenous leukaemia, aged 71 years, on Dec 28, 2004, in New York, NY, USA. Most of Susan Sontag’s novels, nonfiction books, and essays in publications such as The New Yorker and The Times Literary Supplement did not involve health or illness in any direct sense. But it was two of her books—Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)—that made her highly influential among those interested in social medicine and in literature and medicine. “There is no work in anything broadly defined as social medicine that doesn’t cite very early on, often in the first paragraph, her work”, Rita Charon, director of the narrative medicine programme at Columbia University, New York, USA, told The Lancet. “It was a bell that you rang—in the same way that you ring Hippocrates and Osler, you now ring Sontag.” Wendy Parmet, professor of law at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA, commented that “There were medical sceptics who wrote before Susan Sontag”, citing Ivan Illych and Thomas Szasz. “If you think about earlier critiques if it’s not a biological phenomenon, it’s all about society creating a disease.” Sontag, however, did not deny the importance of biological processes and the medical approach, Parmet said. “She recognises that the disease has a simultaneous and equally important social reality that has its own importance but may have very little to do with the biological disease.” Sontag’s father died of tuberculosis in China when she was 5 years old, and her mother remarried a man named Sontag from whom she took her name. Her writings on illness were informed by her own experiences with breast cancer, which was diagnosed in 1978. “Although the way in which disease mystifies is set against a backdrop of new expectations, the 468
disease itself (once TB, cancer today) arouses thoroughly oldfashioned kinds of dread. Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious,” Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. AIDS and its Metaphors, inspired by the loss of several close friends to the illness, expanded the same arguments to AIDS. Parmet, who took part in the first case heard by the US Supreme Court on AIDS, was one of many legal scholars influenced by Sontag, whose work was cited in law reviews and legal briefs. Her work also helped to lead to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, Parmet told The Lancet. In 2003, Sontag published Regarding the Pain of Others, on the suffering of war. Later that year, she became a writer in residence at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, leading a seminar attended by physicians, nurses, social workers, medical students, and literary scholars from around the university. “She let us ultimately talk about our work at levels of meaning that far exceed, or go far deeper, than the kinds of talk that usually go on among doctors”, said Charon, who organised the seminar. “There was a group of psychiatrists, internists, paediatricians, and oncologists, talking in almost whispered terms of how these deaths affect us, how we endure. It was the kind of authentic talk among health care professionals that you would think would happen routinely, but is actually taboo.” Sontag’s work had its critics. Barbara Clow, of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, wrote in 2001 of Sontag’s view that “cancer sufferers are shamed and silenced by metaphors” that “despite the eloquence of Sontag’s prose and the force of her convictions, her conclusions are not wholly persuasive” (Soc Hist Med 2001; 14: 293–312). Charon noted that some of Sontag’s criticism of metaphors was perhaps interpreted too literally. “It became clear in the seminar that a lot of the ‘metaphor is bad kind of stuff’ for her was a form of posturing”, she said. “It was a form of bracing herself to marshal all her forces to get better. She didn’t want to waste time fussing and dawdling—she was so brave, she wanted any treatment, no matter how agonising or painful.” In 1989, on a book tour stop in New York City, Sontag was asked by an audience member what a physician or she would do without metaphor. “You live”, she answered, somewhat irritated, according to an account by Newsday. “You participate in your treatment, you have hope. Metaphor is a code word for misrepresentations, stupidities, false ideas. I’d say people would be better off without them.” But such metaphors do survive her, even if their power has been diminished by her work. She is survived by her sister, Judith Cohen, and a son, David Rieff, who for many years was her editor at publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Ivan Oransky [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 365 February 5, 2005