Language Images of Illness and Emotional Metaphors for Cancer

Of all present diseases, the most cancer is metaphorized. The ancient name for the disease is already a metaphor that provides a certain frightening picture and awakens strong emotions. The brilliant essay “Illness as a metaphor” of Susan Sontag and the popular science book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” of Siddhartha Mukherjee provides a compilation of metaphors that relates not only to cancer but also to their treatment and beyond to doctors, scientists and patients. These metaphors are presented from the linguistic point of view in this article and analyzed in terms of the long metaphor research, which is not the case in the two sources