A Comparative Cognitive - Discourse Analysis of Two Literary Extracts by Arab and European Physician-Writers

Abstract

Physician-writers use language as a basic cognitive tool to encode their professional and imaginative engagement with illness, the body, and human mortality. The aim of the present paper is to identify the conceptual metaphors and cultural schemas on which two physician-writers from different cultural traditions base their encoding of birth-pain. It is a qualitative study that examines the novel Awrāq Shamʿūn al-Miṣrī [The Papers of Shamoun the Egyptian] by the Egyptian writer Ossama Abdul-Raouf Elshazly and the short-story collection Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life by the British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The analysis draws on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Cultural Linguistics (CL), operationalised through the MIP/MIPVU procedure. Results show that the two authors conceptualise birth-pain in systematically opposed ways. Elshazly’s work is based on suffering is a generative womb, a metaphor that combines clinical and spiritual components drawn from Islamic theology. In contrast, Doyle uses childbirth is a combat, a metaphor that reflects a secularised, mechanistic European worldview.