Most analysis of the metaphors of AIDS has considered lay rather than scientific discourse. In general, that analysis has uncovered linguistic strategies that tend to distance the disease from people who are healthy. Moreover, it has criticized those strategies insofar as they categorize and dehumanize the AIDS patient. My own analysis, however, focuses on the writing of Robert Gallo, one of the virologists who claimed credit for isolating the HIV as the cause of AIDS. By examining Gallo's popular and scientific (...) writing, I uncover the metaphor system that underlies his work — and perhaps the work of other virologists studying the HIV. I find in Gallo's writing a system of metaphor that personifies and humanizes the HIV (or the HTLV-III as he originally named it). This system differs significantly from lay systems that tend to objectify AIDS. I argue that the metaphor system that underlies Gallo's work is in fact productive, but that it might preclude other ways of conceptualizing the disease and its causes. The co-factor theory, for instance, entails a different metaphoric system entirely. I suggest that AIDS researchers might examine their own language in an effort to critique the metaphors they use and explore the possibility of using new metaphors. (shrink)

Unlike a great deal of research on expert/non-expert communication, most of which is based on written materials, this article focuses on face-to-face communication. The analysis is based on a large corpus of transcribed recordings of medical seminars in rehabilitation centres and of interviews with chronically ill patients suffering from heart conditions. The focus is on procedures of illustration, which are often combined with reformulation procedures. Four main types are described: metaphors, exemplification, `scenarios', concretization. Whatever the type of illustration used, participants (...) in face-to-face interaction show a marked preference for procedures which relate abstract medical information to everyday life and experience. After a brief outline of the theoretical approach adopted the analysis proceeds in two steps: first, the emphasis is on techniques employed by the `experts', then on those used by `non-experts', i.e. patients. This is followed by an examination of the question how the roles of expert and non-expert are constituted in and by interaction. (shrink)