Science News, October 18th, 1986
Metaphor in Immunology
Chemistry students are familiar with atoms that "like" to bond. Physics students encounter magnetic poles that "repel" or "attract." Science education (and science writing, for that matter) depends on metaphor to illustrate complicateed concepts.
Even metaphor's critics find the practice inescapable. Susan Sontag, while claiming in Illness as Metaphor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978) that medical metaphors are dangerous to patient and researcher alike, introduces her essay by saying that "Illness is the night-side of life." Illness metaphors,she observes, act as a w...
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