ABSTRACT

The body-state metaphor and its illness and parasite scenarios have been declared “dead”, “moribund” or at least deserving to be extinct in several schools of conceptual history. Its anti-Semitic associations have made it suspect on account of the memory of its use by the Nazis.1 Its semantic coherence has been seen as being weakened in the modern era due to the demise of the humoral source knowledge system and its replacement by new, mechanically orientated scientifi c paradigms.2 Some historians have claimed that body-state imagery was developed from a semantically fl exible metaphor complex to an institutional and scientifi c (especially, sociological) terminology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.3 In this view, the metaphor has lost most of its iconicity and suffered what Croft and Cruise (2004) have called a “semantic drift”to a point where it is “no different from a literal expression, and only etymologists and historians of language can recreate the path of derivation”.4