ABSTRACT
Metaphors give meaning to life; allow us to reconfigure ambiguities; educate us into reflexivity to reconsider habitual practices that are ideological and then rhetorical; keep us close to the body and the mind at their limits, while healing the body–mind split; afford diagnostic potential; promise, bolster and give meaning to relational potential as conversations with patients and colleagues; offer a form of defence against the pressures of work; and promise an identity construction.
Medical education, serving the development of medicine, is in the contradictory position of trying to drive a car with the brakes on. While it wants to move forward, it is constantly frustrated by the unintended consequences of its own actions, particularly the historical suppression of the use of metaphor. By repressing the value of metaphor in medicine, medical education is ignoring the very factor that would release the brake and allow the engine to roar. Recognizing that this metaphor is mechanical and the general scepticism shown in this book towards mechanical metaphors of the body as reductive, an alternative metaphor of unintentional hampering of collaboration is offered as two people ‘running’ as if in a three-legged race. Let us release the bound couple and allow them to find their own pace while watching out for one another.
