Sickness and Salvation

Sylvia Lawson

  • Aids and its Metaphors by Susan Sontag
    Allen Lane, 95 pp, £9.95, March 1989, ISBN 0 7139 9025 2
  • The Whole Truth: The Myth of Alternative Health by Rosalind Coward
    Faber, 216 pp, £12.99, June 1989, ISBN 0 571 14114 5

Each of these polemical books considers health and illness in recent Western history. Each moves in to large areas of disputation and advertisement, involving sections of the medical and paramedical professions, the academy and the media, with populations of patients, families, commentators and consumers. Each is launched against beliefs and ways of speaking seen to be retrograde and damaging; each communicates a broadly progressive politics and brings to bear long-developed skills in argument and writing. Their concerns intersect; at several points, the arguments are similar.

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