ABSTRACT
In the spirit of collaboration, the author organized a symposium to bring together some key international players in the field of medical metaphors. The idea was to engage with cutting edge thinking and practice in the field, to distil this, and to write it up with some imaginative reformulation. Participants included clinicians with an interest in medical humanities and metaphors in particular, visual artists, writers, academics and performance artists – all expert, too, in interdisciplinary thinking. A website was set up to support the symposium and to act as an archive. The symposium also acted to form a network for future collaborations.
We discussed a host of topics, but in particular: ethically murky or contradictory metaphors used in clinical ethics, such as organ ‘harvesting’ and ‘trafficking’, and ‘pillow angels’ as a ‘sweetening’ metaphor for children born with severe brain disorders whose normal developmental cycle is adjusted through surgical intervention to make their care more manageable – an intervention challenged by disability activists. Here, metaphors are used as rhetorical ploys. We turned to the longstanding repression of exercising a political imagination in medicine and medical education, in an era that cries out for a social justice component in the undergraduate medicine curriculum. We also re-visited the continuing, if declining, use of medical slang to challenge the view that such slang traditionally offers a safety valve for a highly pressured job. In the current climate of transparency and public accountability, ‘backstage’ medical activity should be brought ‘frontstage’ to the public’s gaze.
