This text is an examination of the fantasies concocted around conditions such as cancer and tuberculosis in our cultural history. The author argues that illness is not a metaphor and that the most truthful way of regarding illness - and the healthiest way of being ill - is to resist such thinking. Her examples of metaphors and images of illness are taken from medical and psychiatric thinking as well as from sources ranging from Greek and medieval writings to Dickens, Thomas Mann, Henry James, Frank Lloyd Wright, Auden and others.