Weather Metaphors in Medicine. A Case Study: the Cytokine Storm Metaphors in English, French, and Romanian

The present chapter starts from conceptualizations based on the relationship between meteorology and medical science in various languages such as English, French and Romanian. These conceptualizations are transferred into several metaphors, which establish an effective communication between a doctor and his patient. While the former represents the specialist in medical science, the latter stands for the layman, for whom the physician must use a derived terminology so as to provide the necessary explanations for a serious disease. The purpose of the chapter is to show the connection established between meteorology (as the source domain) and medical science (as the target domain) during the metaphorical mapping from concrete to abstract concepts (as analyzed in Kövecses, Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford University Press, 2010a; Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, 1980; Grady, The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics, Oxford University Press, pp. 188–213, 2007; Sharifian, Cultural conceptualisations and language: Theoretical framework and applications. John Benjamins Publishing, 2011; Sharifian, Cultural linguistics. Cultural conceptualisations and language. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017). The origin of this metaphorical mapping is found in the fact that weather conditions are expressed through a variety of terms used in everyday communication, most of which the majority of speakers are well acquainted with.