ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the underlying metaphors contained in medical descriptions of menopause and menstruation to show that these ways of describing events are but one way of fitting an interpretation to the facts. Nineteenth century writers were extremely prone to stress the debilitating nature of menstruation and its adverse impact on the lives and activities of women. Medical images of menstruation as pathological were remarkably vivid by the end of the century. Development of the new molecular biology brought additional metaphors based on information science, management, and control. In this model, flow of information between deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid leads to the production of protein. Molecular biologists conceive of the cell as “an assembly line factory in which the DNA blueprints are interpreted and raw materials fabricated to produce the protein end products in response to a series of regulated requirements”.
