Metaphors of medicine and the culture of healing: Historical perspectives By Jakob Tanner

https://www.academia.edu/7406481/Metaphors_of_medicine_and_the_culture_of_healing_Historical_perspectives?email_work_card=title This essay is intended to provide a historical perspective on the role of metaphors in medicine and the relevance of various cultures of healing. This last notion is itself prone to metaphorical transfers, because "healing" not only means the recovery from a disease or injury but also connotes emphatic concepts of health, fortune, salvation, and redemption. Words and images are mobilized to generate discourses of physical and mental perfection and to construct a utopia of eternal happiness. These imagin ings take us far beyond a realistic assessment of the capacities and future potentials of modern medicine, and the more opaque such expectations are, the more seductive metaphorical operations become. Since medical systems and practices are very complex and are subject to many contradictory influences and divergent requirements, their descrip tion shows a strong inclination to rely upon metaphorical operations. This attitude has been contested by authors like Susan Sontag, who wrote in her illuminating essay "Illness as Metaphor," "My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness-and the healthiest way of being ill-is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking" (Sontag 1979: 3). Also, this "truthful way" is not completely free of metaphors, but it is based on a serious will to restrict their power on the understanding of what an illness is. Before addressing how metaphorical operations and discursive disposi tives have worked in the past and have been approached in historical stud ies of science and medicine, I will first explore what could be understood as a historical perspective on biomedicine as culture, and I will raise crucial questions of current interest for the historical understanding of biomedi cine as a field of cultural practice. The understanding of illness and medicine depends on significantly chang ing and different sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts. The problem ...