ABSTRACT
The book’s argument is re-stated: medical culture needs to be democratized, bringing feminine values of collaboration and care to a historically shaped medical culture that has been dominated by values of individualism, heroism and autocracy. The primary medium for democratization is metaphor, where the twin guiding metaphors shaping medicine – the body as machine and medicine as war – now need to be reconfigured or allowed to decay. We need new metaphors for socialization and identity construction of trainee doctors in an era of fluid, collaborative, patient-centred practice offering greater public transparency and accountability. The meanings and roles of metaphors in medicine are summarized in terms of metaphors being good to think with, and to communicate through. Ten key ways that metaphors are used in medicine are discussed. The reader is reminded (through the illustrative example of the metaphor of ‘risk’) that the same metaphor can take on differing meanings according to context.
