We sometimes refer to the collective effort of medical science as the ‘medical literature’. Whatever else it is, little of what is written in medical journals is literature. One may ask, ‘Why should medical journals have any pretension to artistic merit? They exist to transmit information, not to enrich the soul.’ True, but anyone who writes, if they want people to read their writing and absorb their information, will fare better if they have a feel for language. It is this obvious lack of a feel for language that so upsets me when I read the journals.
Doctors commonly write a form of English they would never dream of using in any other circumstance: ponderous, wordy, taking delight in avoiding any everyday word if there is a polysyllabic or less familiar alternative. Where else but in medical journals do we read obviate instead of prevent, or adumbrate instead of outline? What makes armamentarium better than treatments? Why prefer demonstrate to show? Who is impressed by this stuff?
If there is one feature that stands out as almost pathognomonic of this diseased language, it is concatenated nouns: strings of modifiers (although not always nouns) giving little clue to what is modifying what. I do have a vested interest,1 but can you doubt the need for a feel for language in the person who wrote about ‘a non-invasive and ionising radiation free arteriovenous fistulae surveillance study’? This appeared (and I thank the researcher who allowed me to quote it) in a draft information leaflet for patients taking part in a research project. It is almost as if all little words were somehow tainted and better left out. It is the little words that clarify.
Who would want to go on a course that included a lecture about ‘Resource releasing operational planning concepts’? On second thoughts, perhaps little words wouldn't help generate interest in that one; the nursing lecture about ‘Discourses of care in the occupational resistance strategies of nursing’ wasn't very appealing either.
Of course, doctors are not alone in their abuse of English, but doctors are supposed to be well educated. We read books; we go to the opera. It just needs a little care, a little thought, a little use of the virtual ear to feel for what is right.
The virtual ear could have prevented the notice in the public lavatories of Bristol airport advising what to do ‘In the event of a terminal evacuation …’
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2007.
