PEDIATRICS Vol. 65 No. 2 February 1980, pp. 263
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METAPHORS HELP US TO UNDERSTAND THE BODY

A. G. S. P.

"... medicine did not make an effective contribution to human welfare until the middle of the twentieth century. The great leap forward is often attributed to a rapid increase in heroic procedures and the discovery of new drugs, but what distinguishes the medicine of the past twenty-five years is not that its practitioners are equipped with an arsenal of antibiotics and antiseptics, but that they are furnished with a comprehensive and unprecedented understanding of what the healthy body is and how it survives and protects itself. ... since finding out what something is is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors.

... It is impossible to imagine how anyone could have made sense of the heart before we knew what a pump was. Before the invention of automatic gun turrets, there was no model to explain the finesse of voluntary muscular movement.

... the subjective experience of the body is usually incoherent and perplexing, and when we want it put right, we refer to people who have learnt to think about it with the help of technical metaphors...."