Abstract Contemporary metaphor theory holds that metaphor, rather than a rhetoric method affiliated with languages, is a tool of human cognition and a process of reshaping human experience. This study, drawing upon new theories of metaphor, attempts to make an overall exploration into the conception of “disease” through collecting and analyzing a vast body of English for medical purpose (EMP) literatures. The related metaphorical expressions and conceptual metaphors from the live language were analyzed, compared and explained from a cognitive view, thereby strongly confirming the ubiquity of metaphor in EMP discourse.