A Comparative Cognitive Analysis of Selected Arab and European Physician-Writers’ Literary Works

Physician-writers - physicians who are also trained clinicians and who write literary fiction, essays, or memoir - may offer a window into how different cultures conceptualise illness, since they write as both clinicians and authors. Although metaphor has been extensively studied in medical discourse, research has concentrated on the Western ILLNESS IS WAR metaphor and given less attention to differences in the conceptualisation of illness between Arab and European physician-writers. This study identifies the conceptual metaphors and cultural schemas through which six physician-writers encode illness, the body, death, and the moral order in which suffering and loss are placed, determining the source domain, target domain, and mappings involved in each, in order to compare patterns across the Arab and European corpora. Adopting a comparative cognitive analysis, the study examines 12 extracts from three Arab and three European physician-writers through an integrated three-stage procedure informed by Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Cultural Linguistics, and the Metaphor Identification Procedure. The analysis shows that the ILLNESS IS WAR metaphor does not organise the encoding of suffering in the Arabic extracts, where it is systematically replaced by culturally embedded schemas - religious in two writers, social and ironic in the third - while the European corpus divides three ways, with one writer, Doyle, standing structurally closer to the Arabic pattern than to his European counterparts. These results carry direct implications for medical education, cross-cultural clinical communication, and the medical humanities, and suggest that cultural inheritance, more than membership of an East or a West, shapes how a physician-writer encodes suffering.