Medical Jargon - An Overview

Abstract

"They do certainly give very strange and new-fangled names to diseases" — Plato (427-347BC)

"The Patient's Ears remorseless he assails, Murthers with Jargon where his Med'cine fails" - Sir Samuel Garth (1661-1719)

That's all very well, gentlemen, but only laymen called it Jargon. The correct medical term is Correct Medical Terminology. We doctors can't go around calling Familial Dysbetalipoproteinaemia "a touch of the nasties", now can we? Any more than we'd call Erysipelothrix rhuziopathia "a little bug". So just moderate your language, Sam; and as for you, Plato — run along and play with your friends.

Precision is vital to good communication, and medical men use jargon only to define exactly what they mean. Or do they? Occasionally, perhaps, there may be the tiniest hint of Jargon For Jargon's Sake — our profession has few other status symbols left nowadays, and sometimes it is regrettably necessary to subdue an uppity patient by blinding him with science. But under normal circumstances the use of jargon purely to impress people is limited to students and paramedical personnel, showing off their phraseology like a lance-corporal's stripe. Tyro jargoneers hold forth only to the awe-struck laity, since they remain uncomfortably aware that one slip will reveal their bluff and cause cruel hilarity to the initiated. In one hospital where I worked nobody had the kindness to correct a pleasant old nurse who for years referred to "urea and electric lights". (Another fond memory of nursing jargon: a successful enema is always said to have been "given with good result" — a merciful phrase which spares passers-by the details — and I remember a nurse exclaiming after an incontinent patient developed diarrhoea, "There was result everywhere!")