The Military Metaphors of Modern Medicine

Medical discourse is replete with the language of war and such phrases as ”the war on cancer,” ”magic bullets,” “silver bullets,” “the therapeutic armamentarium,” “agents of disease,” “the body’s defences,” and “doctor’s orders” are deeply engrained in our medical rhetoric. The mindset engendered by this discourse of war renders the patient as a battlefield upon which the doctor-combatant defeats the arch-enemy, disease. The reified disease becomes the object of the physician’s attention, displacing the patient as the interlocutor in the doctor-patient relationship. This shift of attention is exacerbated by contemporary imaging methodologies, and patients, who in Foucault’s clinic became open to the medical gaze, are rendered totally transparent, perhaps virtual. Diagnostics becomes centred on the putative agent and therapeutics revolves around extirpation and conquest. Arguably, the most important effect of this framing of medicine is the eradication of the patient’s voice from the narrative of illness. The dialogic construction of the narrative of illness is supplanted by the physician’s case record of his search for the physical seat of disease and the healing effected through the development of meaning falls victim to a militarized discourse. The military metaphors that pervade medicine undermine the ability of physicians and society to deal with the burgeoning burden of chronic illness.