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MILITARY METAPHOR IN THE LANGUAGE PICTURE OF THE WORLD OF MEDICINE: YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2021. Issue 3 (29). P. 153-175

Traditionally, medicine was considered to be a territory of mercy, which the patient turned to not only for treatment, but also for moral support and compassion. Recently, however, patients and society as a whole have been increasingly confronted with the fact that medical professionals do not respond to this request: medical care has become a service, and patients are less and less likely to find comfort and consolation in the words of a doctor. Future doctors often lose the ability to respond to other people’s pain and to empathize at the stage of training when they absorb the specific atmosphere of the medical world, join its culture. One element of this culture is the language that doctors, as well as laypeople if they are concerned with medical issues, speak and write. An important element of any language is its metaphors. By analyzing the use of metaphors in medical discourse, one can get an idea of the linguistic world of medicine, and of the medical world as a whole. It is quite revealing that one of the most common metaphors in medical discourse is the military metaphor. Like any metaphor, it not only reflects, but also forms a picture of the world in people’s minds, playing both positive and negative roles. Its negative impact on the general atmosphere of the medical world has been recognized to be so significant that there is an increasing tendency to suggest that its use in medical discourse should be abandoned, and it should be replaced by metaphors of cooperation and harmony. The first among them is the metaphor of a journey, which nowadays enters quite organically into medical discourse. This metaphor allows the patient to comprehend their long life with an incurable disease, and the doctor to find their role of an older fellow traveler, instructor, guide in this journey; communication of the former with the latter may have a therapeutic effect. By analyzing the use of the military metaphor in medical discourse in a temporal context, we can conclude that “yesterday” it allowed us to create a more or less adequate picture of the medical world in the minds of people, “today”, not keeping pace with the changes occurring in this sphere, it begins to introduce distortion, from which both patients and medical staff, as well as society as a whole, suffer; therefore, “tomorrow” its use in medical discourse will most likely decrease, giving way to metaphors of peace, unity and harmony.

Keywords: medical discourse, military metaphor, metaphorical violence, metaphor of journey