Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bleakley, Alan

Titel

What do we know about metaphors in medicine and what are the consequences of resisting metaphor?

Ist Teil von

• Thinking with Metaphors in Medicine, 2017, Vol.1, p.42-53

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• How metaphors ‘work’ in medicine is poorly understood, yet is key to effective medical education. Refusal of metaphor in medicine (for example, lack of acknowledgement of the value of ‘thinking with’ metaphor for diagnostic purposes) can lead to repressed metaphor returning in a distorted form – as descriptive literalism, such as English for Medical Purposes (EMP), and as potentially malicious medical slang, where metaphors are used as an inappropriate defence against the pressures of work. EMP pervades medical education, depersonalizing patients (reducing them to symptoms) and forcing students to compress information, compromising the narrative element informing medical acumen. The public does not have access to the ‘backstage’ metaphorical events of medicine such as use of slang, but this is introduced through the scripts of television ‘medi-soaps’ such as ‘House MD’, which can act in the capacity of public engagement with medicine. Refusal of metaphor in medicine can lead to repressed metaphor returning in a distorted form: as descriptive literalism, such as English for Medical Purposes (EMP), and as potentially malicious medical slang, where metaphors are used as an inappropriate defence against the pressures of work. EMP pervades medical education, depersonalizing patients and forcing students to compress information, compromising the narrative element informing medical acumen. Sam Vaisrub, a distinguished physician, wrote the first study of metaphors in medicine. Since Vaisrub's pioneering work, the history of interest in metaphors in medicine can be summed up as a history of neglect. This chapter argues that such woeful neglect has had a knock-on effect for medical education. After Sam Vaisrub's groundbreaking book, Geraldine van Rijn-van Tongeren published a systematic study of metaphors in medical texts. Van Rijn-van Tongeren argues that the metaphors she notes in medical texts are not just descriptive, but also serve to facilitate the forming of medical theories.