Sontag – Illness as Metaphor, 1978

The policy of equivocating about the nature of their disease with cancer patients reflects the conviction that dying people are best spared the news that they are dying, and that the good death is the sudden one, best of all if it happens while we’re unconscious or asleep. Yet the modern denial of death does not explain the extent of the lying and with the to be lied to; it does not touch the deepest dread. Someone who has had a coronary is at least as likely to die of another one within a few years, as someone with cancer is likely to die soon from cancer. But no one thinks of concealing the truth from the cardiac patient: there is nothing shameful about a hear attack. Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene –0- in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses. Cardiac disease implies a weakness, trouble, failure that is mechanical; there is no disgrace, nothing of the taboo that once surrounded people afflicted with TB and still surrounds those who have cancer.