Metáforas do corpo humano nas ciências da saúde: os mapeamentos conceptuais das estruturas, órgãos e vísceras

Abstract

The goal of this project was to identify in a basic book of health care, Anatomia Humana Básica (DANGELO & FATTINI, 2005), metaphorical expressions related to the conceptualization of the target domain HUMAN BODY which draw inferences from the linguistic system to the embodied conceptual system. In addition, the project aimed to investigate the genesis of the metaphors found as well as their social, economic, political and cultural contexts of production throughout history. The method used was linguistic analysis, which consists in taking a set of written or spoken utterances as data base. Therefore, it was possible to make the inferences from the linguistic system (that is, the basic book of care health) to the embodied conceptual system of the authors as well as to track down the metaphors genesis throughout history. The metaphors found were, in order of importance, HUMAN BODY IS THREE-DIMENSIONAL OBJECT/CONTAINER, HUMAN BODY IS MACHINE, HUMAN BODY IS INDUSTRY, HUMAN BODY IS TOPOGRAPHY, HUMAN BODY IS FABRIC, and HUMAN BODY IS VEGETABLE. All these metaphors are the result of the European Modern Age, and they were consolidated effectively after the Bourgeois Revolutions and Industrial Revolutions. With this project, it was possible to prove that scientific theories are not literal, objective and neutral, but constitutive, in great part, of complex metaphors.