ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on metaphors of health and the human body we are reminded of Sontag's caution that, despite a rich literary and cultural tradition of metaphors for illness, illness itself is not a metaphor, but a real biological event with real biological consequences. It shows, people are incorrigible users of metaphors in thinking about sickness and health and the workings of the body, so much so that even the interpretation of biological events is infused with metaphorical thinking that owes little to scientific findings. The chapter investigates naive conceptions of how the cardiovascular system works and what causes it to malfunction. It examines only the "folk" models of nonexperts. The simple metaphors for understanding the cardiovascular system that lay people possess may be limited in utility and misleading when compared with complex and scientifically informed expert models.
