Supports: “Did she, on some level, feel she lost the battle because she didn’t fight hard enough?” I chose this quote because I really connected to this. My grandmother passed away from lung cancer when I was young so she always told me she was a strong fighter and was going to win the battle. Obviously she didn’t, and I am wondering if she was thinking this. I think that metaphors that are related to serious medical issues, should be less normalized. These metaphors can cause people to think like this which can make them even more depressed during their last part of their lives.
Develops: “Over the centuries, we’ve internalized these military metaphors, so much that we often may not recognize how they influence us.” Absolutely. I never thought about how metaphors can affect our health until I read this essay. Ive always heard people “fighting” their illnesses, and never realized what it actually meant and how it can affect peoples metal health. I think talking about how relating illnesses battles and fights and its possible negative impact could help people a lot. People would understand how it can negatively affect their mental health; when people are dying from an illness they should focus on their mental health even more so they can be as happy as possible in their last days.
Disagree: “‘Metaphors may be as necessary to illness as they are to literature, as comforting to the patient as his own bathrobe and slippers.'” I disagree with this metaphor because it is proven that connecting military metaphors to medical issues can be harmful to peoples mental health, and mental health is just as important as physical health. I understand that metaphors help doctors describe to patients what’s wrong with them, but they can chose other ways of doing so.
Geary: “…ideas, emotions, feelings, concepts, thoughts — we inevitably resort to metaphor.” I chose this quote because it proves that we use metaphors to help us cope, especially when it has to do with medical issues. But I believe we should try to stop doing that.
Erard: “Or do we grasp metaphors more readily when at least one of the concepts is very familiar?” I chose this quote because I believe this is true. For example, cancer or illness in general is pretty familiar to most people, so metaphors relating to it is highly understood. Not everyone will understand a metaphor about art, but will understand most medical metaphors.
The first two quotes that you wrote about I had also picked and wrote about in my blog post, which I think is interesting because it shows the importance of the quotes to the theme and the understanding of the paper. However the third quote you picked I had not, and I feel as though when I read it I did not soak in the content. I think its interesting that you disagreed with this quote, when I was reading I found that I may have actually thought metaphors helped sickness and believed the author despite being so against it before.