The paper investigates conceptual and ideological implications of corporeal and medical imagery in British and German press coverage of European Union politics during the 1990s, documented in a bilingual corpus. The analysis shows that by no means all aspects of the source domain BODY-HEALTH-ILLNESS are employed in public debate. Rather, a few prominent, complex conceptual metaphors, such as (EURO-)SCLEROSIS, SICK MAN OF EUROPE, HEART DISEASE and PREMATURE BIRTH, dominate the two national samples. The distribution shows that examples of the HEART DISEASE metaphor are found primarily in the British sample while uses of the PREMATURE BIRTH metaphor are limited to the German sample. It is also at this level of specific domain elements (rather than whole domains) that a political and ideological bias is discernible. Thus, HEART DISEASE scenarios served in British debates during the 1990s mainly to denounce the EU as rotten or sick at its centre, whilst the PREMATURE BIRTH concept was used in Germany to express a party-political commitment to care for the euro. The combination of cognitive metaphor analysis with corpus-based methods can thus reveal characteristic ideological contrasts between the uses of elements of one metaphorical source domain in different discourse communities.
