The Images of Human Being within the Metaphors of Organ Donation

The paper focuses on the metaphors related to organ donation and transplantation in order to highlight the implicit images of human being. In a brief analytical review, conceptual metaphors as scientific terms within the medical and biological discourse are considered. On the other hand, the author addresses verbal and visual metaphors used in public service advertising on organ donation. The ethical aspects and value-ladenness of these metaphors are brought into discussion. It is argued that the category of gift still holds a special place in the verbal and visual metaphors in public service advertising on organ donation. However, in scientific and professional medical discourses related to transplantation, there is a predominance of technical metaphors stemming from the Modern worldview. The image of human being as a mechanism or machine can effectively perform explanatory and heuristic functions in natural sciences. At the same time, mechanistic metaphors not only reflect historically formed ideas about human being but also transmit them into the future and suggest certain ways of how human being can be dealt with. When used within scientific discourses, technical metaphors in relation to the human being might be perceived as something common and ethically neutral. However, when transferred into the area of public social advertising, such metaphors might presumably cause tension in public opinion. Like any other metaphor, the human-machine image has its limits of applicability. Going beyond these limits and turning into a kind of mechanistic myth, this metaphor reduces and depersonalizes the human being, subsequently causing ethical collisions within biomedical practices. Such reduction is also related to other artifact metaphors. Analogizing human body and organs to an object leads in transplantation to the implicit predominance of a reduced image of human being whose body has merely an instrumental value as a scarce resource.