A Comparative Cognitive - Discourse Analysis of Two Literary Extracts by Arab and European Physician-Writers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31185/wjfh.Vol22.Iss3/Pt3.2008Keywords:
Physician-writers; Conceptual Metaphor Theory; Cultural LinguisticsAbstract
Physician-writers use language as a basic cognitive tool to encode their professional and imaginative engagement with illness, the body, and human mortality. The aim of the present paper is to identify the conceptual metaphors and cultural schemas on which two physician-writers from different cultural traditions base their encoding of birth-pain. It is a qualitative study that examines the novel Awrāq Shamʿūn al-Miṣrī [The Papers of Shamoun the Egyptian] by the Egyptian writer Ossama Abdul-Raouf Elshazly and the short-story collection Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life by the British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The analysis draws on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Cultural Linguistics (CL), operationalised through the MIP/MIPVU procedure. Results show that the two authors conceptualise birth-pain in systematically opposed ways. Elshazly’s work is based on suffering is a generative womb, a metaphor that combines clinical and spiritual components drawn from Islamic theology. In contrast, Doyle uses childbirth is a combat, a metaphor that reflects a secularised, mechanistic European worldview.
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Woods, A. (2011). The limits of narrative: Provocations for the medical humanities. Medical Humanities, 37(2), 73–78.
Bleakley, A. (2015). Medical humanities and medical education: How the medical humanities can shape better doctors. London: Routledge.
Charon, R. (2006). Narrative medicine: Honoring the stories of illness. Oxford University Press.
Coope, J. (1997). Doctor Chekhov: A study in literature and medicine. Cross Cultural Press.
Doyle, A. C. (1894). Round the Red Lamp: Being facts and fancies of medical life. Methuen & Co. (Project Gutenberg eBook 423)
Elshazly, U. A. R. (2021). Awraq Shamoun al-Masri [The papers of Shamoun the Egyptian]. Cairo: Dar al-Riwaq.
Flusberg, S. J., Matlock, T., & Thibodeau, P. H. (2018). War metaphors in public discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 33(1), 1–18.
Foucault, M. (1973). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Tavistock. (Original work published 1963)
Goodman, L. E. (1992). Avicenna. Routledge.
Halpern, J. (2001). From detached concern to empathy: Humanizing medical practice. Oxford University Press.
Hunter, K. M. (1991). Doctors' stories: The narrative structure of medical knowledge. Princeton University Press.
Kleinman, A. (1988). The illness narratives: Suffering, healing, and the human condition. Basic Books.
Kövecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in culture: Universality and variation. Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
Lloyd, G. E. R. (1983). Science, folklore and ideology: Studies in the life sciences in ancient Greece. Cambridge University Press.
Nasr, S. H. (1987). Islamic spirituality: Foundations. Routledge.
Palmer, G. B. (1996). Toward a theory of cultural linguistics. University of Texas Press.
Porter, R. (1997). The greatest benefit to mankind: A medical history of humanity from antiquity to the present. HarperCollins.
Pragglejaz Group. (2007). MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 22(1), 1–39.
Rahman, F. (1987). Health and medicine in the Islamic tradition. Crossroad.
Semino, E. (2008). Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge University Press.
Sharifian, F. (2011). Cultural conceptualisations and language: Theoretical framework and applications. John Benjamins.
Sharifian, F. (2017). Cultural linguistics: Cultural conceptualisations and language. John Benjamins.
Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Steen, G. J., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A., Krennmayr, T., & Pasma, T. (2010). A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU. John Benjamins.
Woods, A. (2011). The limits of narrative: Provocations for the medical humanities. Medical Humanities, 37(2), 73–78.
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