Today, the language of war attaches itself to
medicine. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Geologist Scott Montgomery's
book, The Scientific Voice, dives deep
into the language of science, and what he finds is
anything but scientific detachment [1]. He tracks the way the language of
science bends science itself to fit cultural norms
and metaphors.
He gives examples: psychology, Japanese science,
how we've studied the moon in terms of the language
we use to describe it. His most telling chapter
might be the one on medicine and language.
For example, when Harvey
studied blood flow in the 17th century, most people
thought blood made one pass through the body, that
it was generated, then consumed in various tissues.
Harvey showed blood moved in a closed loop and he
called that motion "circulation." Others had
suggested a closed loop, but it hadn't caught on.
Blood didn't circulate until Harvey gave us the
right word.
A huge linguistic transition occurred around 1870
and Louis Pasteur had much to do with it. Early
19th-century doctors still said the plague infected
people or lay upon them. It didn't attack them, or
strike them down. That's what armies did, not
diseases.
When Pasteur was young, disease was caused by an
excess of irritation or an overabundance of vital
force. But at the same time he articulated his germ
theory, the language of Europe was shot through
with military metaphors. Politics also used
metaphors that cast the nation-state as a living
being. Bad policy might be called a disease in the
body politic.
So germs became an invading army. While the
Prussians lay siege to Paris, Pasteur was saying
that, in fermentation, germs laid siege to beer and
wine. He pressed the analogy relentlessly. When he
wrote on public affairs he said France had been
enfeebled by revolution and rendered sterile by
political theory.
For over a century since, medicine has embraced
those metaphors. AIDS stalks us; it uses many
strategies in its attack. It invades and kills
T-cells. Disease strikes the body's defenses. As
doctors became soldiers at war with illness the
metaphor carried into medical practice. An intern's
training resembles nothing more than my own
experience in basic training. Hospitals are
organized in a militaristic hierarchy with the
doctor as general.
Alternative medicine has become less a body of
technical knowledge than an attempt at linguistic
reform. And as it tries to claim legitimacy it too
slips back into military metaphor. It calls the
mind to marshal forces of good in the battleground
of our body.
The only way we'll bring medicine into better
alignment with our human nature, Montgomery says,
is by heightening awareness. Just as we've had to
do in areas of sexism and racism, we have to be
aware of the words we use. Medicine can be changed
and, indeed, it must be. The military metaphor has
run to the end of its usefulness. But the changes are ones we can make only after we've
created a new language of medical discourse.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
