Is Sonia's privacy a public matter?

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place." This beautiful passage is from Susan Sontag's seminal essayIllness as Metaphor, an argument against "the lurid metaphors" with which "the kingdom of ill" has been "landscaped". So it was all figurative or metaphorical when it came to tuberculosis in the nineteenth century; and today cancer is the illness that continues to be mystified.