She finds that, a decade later, cancer is no longer swathed in secrecy and shame, but has been replaced by AIDS as the disease most demonized by society.

Also, because its earlier years in the United States were marked by an affliction of very specific risk groups – homosexual men and intravenous drug users – it has been stigmatized.

For example, numerous artists suffered from syphilis, and it came to be an accepted view that its effects on the brain could actually inspire original thought.

Sontag defines metaphors as "giving the thing a name that belongs to something else", and notes that they have been used throughout history to discuss the body, illness, and health.

There are "immunological defenses" and "aggressive" medicine, and the "efforts to reduce mortality from a given disease are called a fight... a war".

When AIDS is seen as affecting a "risk group", it brings back the historical idea that the "illness has judged".

In this new vision of illness, one can lose their employment, their housing, and their place in society years before any changes in health.

Also, with modern advances in medicine, society had begun to believe that epidemics and incurable illnesses were a thing of the past.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt writes that although "valuable as both history and practical advice",[2] the work is missing conclusions and opinions that would make it more powerful.

Sontag doesn't actually answer the questions of whether adapting behavior in the face of AIDS is the appropriate protection against infection, or how society should react to the epidemic.

Paul Robinson writes that "the disease itself, and not the way we talk about it, is the true source of its horror,"[3] and turns Sontag's point that "we cannot think without metaphors" on itself.

"[3] Literary critic Camille Paglia writes that AIDS and Its Metaphors was an attempt by Sontag to play "catch-up" after twenty years of silence about gay issues.

Paglia added that although she normally disagrees with "the gay-activist establishment", in her view Sontag was "rightly clobbered" by gay activists over the work.