The Authoritative Metaphor and Social Change: Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's Direct Mailer, “Understanding AIDS”

Abstract

In 1988, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop published “Understanding AIDS,” the nation's first and only direct mailing sent to every private home in the country. His appeals therein were driven by what we label authoritative metaphors. Communicated by and/or attributed to persons of authority, authoritative metaphors capitalize on the symbolic force of sanctioned power by appealing to the ethos of office. In “Understanding AIDS,” we find that Koop drew from his positions as a surgeon and a general, respectively, to equate AIDS with an unprecedented plague and an unprecedented war. He created new authoritative metaphors out of the vestiges of familiar metaphors related to disease and public health and thereby portrayed AIDS as a recognizable but decisively unique dilemma requiring distinct preventative behaviors.

Notes

¹It should be noted that the President has, in recent history, forced the Surgeon General's resignation. In 1994, President Bill Clinton fired Surgeon General M. Joycelyn Elders after she spoke in favor of teaching students about masturbation in sex education classes (Levine, 2002).

²Recent meta-analytic research by Sopory and Dillard (2002) found that metaphor use in general is not related to higher perceived communicator credibility.

³One of the most egregious examples of such exploitation is the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in which the U.S. Public Health Service (the departmental seal of which is featured in “Understanding AIDS”) studied how syphilis—left untreated—progressed in the bodies of African American men. The experiment went on for over 40 years, during which time participants knew neither that they were infected nor that they were participating in a governmental study (Jones, 1993).