αἰδέονται φράζειν: Female Patients’ Figurative Language in the Corpus Hippocraticum

Abstract

Issue regarding ancient medicine: the role played by female patient’s figurative language within the medical relationship. In particular, I set out to elaborate on the prognostic, diagnostic and therapeutic potential inherent in the patients’ metaphorical way of thinking about and expressing their own experiences of disease. Metaphors, images, and similes are frequently employed by laymen when they talk to physicians; upon closer scrutiny, this fact testifies to the intrinsically metaphorical structure of our everyday thinking. More precisely, this phenomenon emerges especially when female patients are confronted with the conceptualisation of what is less immediately accessible in experience, such as the nature and causation of their own suffering. In other words, metaphors help them understand and talk about their health, be it psychic or physical. But physicians can turn our images into medical signs, as if they were real symptoms, if they are able to “decode” them appropriately.