„the healthiest way of being ill“?

Susan Sontag’s essays Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors continue to provide a productive basis for scientific work at the interface of medical history, linguistics, and cultural studies. This article transfers the main contentual observations of the two texts to a German-language medium by examining their occurrence in the journal „Der Spiegel“ during the period from 1973 to 2013. Hence, insights into both public representation and illness metaphors of cancer and AIDS during this period are gained. The results are discussed in terms of their historical context as well as their appropriateness with regard to the public responsibility of „Der Spiegel“, using media ethics and impulses from oncological research as theoretical foundations.