Susan Sontag Quotes About Illness
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Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
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Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.
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The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
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The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
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Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
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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.
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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
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