Illness as Metaphor: The Scope of Metaphors in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Abstract
Science, which has long supported literalism as the symbol of a truly scientific method and is thereby considered to operate exclusively within the domain of objectivity is regarded a forbidden track for poetry or figurative language. Hence, metaphors which are quite common in the literary genres are roughly heard in the scientific field. The assertion since time immemorial that scientists do not employ metaphors is an irony as is revealed by the etymology of medical terms such as mumps(derived from the 16th century English mump, meaning grimace) and cancer( from the Latin for crab), thereby unraveling the presence of metaphor in science. Hence, it is difficult to conceive of illness free from metaphorical terms as metaphor is an important tool in the popularization of medical knowledge. The rigidity posed by the scientific language which once permitted language into its exotic territory only in the form of symbols and formulas is at present challenged by the writings of such physician-writers as Siddhartha Mukherjee, Atul Gawande, who with their great command of language merges the objective subject and the subjective language. This unification, apart from opening a new genre(creative nonfiction) in the world of literature also signals a novel scope of therapeutic storytelling. Mukherjees The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer which introduces the disease using a highly metaphorical language is an instance.