ABSTRACT
The doctors I admire most have not been titans of knowledge, preternaturally dextrous surgical wizards, or empathic wells into which a patient’s pain can be poured to the cleansing, cathartic benefit of all. Nor have my favourites been tireless and error-free machines that provide consummate, efficacious care from sunup to sundown. Have these offered perfect models of health using their own vigorous, fit, and radiant selves as proof? No. The doctors I admire are, instead, creative practitioners able to communicate with patients using metaphor. Such doctors routinely encounter a problem or a means of seeing a problem that a patient cannot comprehend, reach into an improvisational bag of metaphor, and, in the midst of a moment of clinical difficulty with patient and doctor at an impasse, rhetorically construct a bridge to understanding. These doctors appreciate the power inherent to metaphor, a power that effects the sudden revelation of a previously unknown truth, that allows a thing to be seen both for what it is and is not. This chimera can, in my witnessed experience, make all the difference. Being able to think metaphorically, however, takes a good deal of practice.
