Abstract
Part personal documentary, part exercise in medical semantics, this essay brings the analytical tools of a linguist and the human perspective of a patient receiving treatment in the American health care system to bear on the language we use—for the most part unconsciously—to talk about illness and disease. Topics to be explored include linguistic ramifications of the illness/disease distinction; referring expressions for health disorders; the “linguistic construction” of disease (what's in a name?); the “translation” of biomedical information from the specialists' dialect into everyday idiom; and the metaphoric/symbolic dimension of body-parts and their afflictions.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Ainsworth-Vaughn, Nancy. Forthcoming. Doctor-patient communication. In Handbook of discourse analysis, ed. Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi Hamilton. Oxford: Blackwell.
Alberts, Bruce, Dennis Bray, Julian Lewis, et al. 1993. Molecular biology of the cell, 2d ed. New York & London: Garland.
Anderson, Charles M. 1989. Richard Selzer and the rhetoric of surgery. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Aplastic Anemia Foundation of America (AAFA). 1996. Myelodysplastic syndromes answer book. Annapolis, MD.
Bennett, John M., Dieter Catovsky, M. T. Daniel, et al. 1982. Proposals for the classification of the myelodysplastic syndromes. British Journal of Hæmatology, 51: 189.
Bernard, Jean. 1976. Preleukemic states. Blood Cells 2: 5–7, 347–351. (Proceedings of the INSERM Symposium, Paris, Sept. 19–21, 1975).
Boogaerts, Marc A., George E. G. Verhoef, and Hilde Demuynck. 1996. Treatment and prognostic factors in myelodysplastic syndromes. Ballières Clinical Hematology 9(1): 161–183.
Boyd, J. Wesley. 1996. Narrative aspects of a doctor-patient encounter. Journal of Medical Humanities 17(1): 5–15.
Buck, Carl Darling. 1949. A dictionary of selected synonyms in the principal Indo-European languages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Carter, Albert Howard III. 1989. Metaphors in the physician-patient relationship. Soundings 72(1): 153–64.
Carter, Albert Howard III, and Lawrence B. McCullough, eds. 1989. Metaphors, language, and medicine, a special section of Soundings 72(1): 8–164.
Cassell, Eric J. 1976. Disease as an “it”: Concepts of disease revealed by patients' presentation of symptoms. Social Science and Medicine 10: 143–46.
Cassell, Eric J. 1985. Talking with patients. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press.
Charon, Rita. 1992. To build a case: medical histories as traditions in conflict. Literature and Medicine 11(1): 115–32.
Chenail, Ronald J. 1991. Medical discourse and systematic frames of comprehension. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Crookshank, Francis Graham. 1938. The importance of a theory of signs and a critique of language in the study of medicine. In The meaning of meaning: A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism, 5th ed., ed. Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards, 337–55. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.: New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc.
DeVita, Elizabeth. 1995. The decline of the doctor-patient relationship. American Health 14:63–67, 105.
Diekema, Douglas S. 1989. Metaphors, medicine, and morals. Soundings 72(1): 17–26.
Donnelly, William J. 1986. Medical language as symptom: Doctor talk in teaching hospitals. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 30(1): 81–94.
Fisher, Sue and Alexandra Dundas Todd. 1993. The social organization of doctor-patient communication, 2d ed. Norwood, NJ: Ablex (1st ed. 1983, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC).
Fleischman, Suzanne. 1998. Gender, the personal, and the voice of scholarship. Signs 23(4): 975–1016.
Fleischman, Suzanne. Forthcoming. Language and medicine. In Handbook of discourse analysis, ed. Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi Hamilton. Oxford: Blackwell.
Galton, D. A. 1989. The myelodysplastic syndrome. British Medical Journal 299: 582.
Geeraerts, Dirk, and Stef Grondelaers. 1995. Looking back at anger: Cultural traditions and metaphorical patterns. In Language and the cognitive construal of the world, ed. John Taylor, 153–179. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Good, Byron J. 1977. The heart of what's the matter: The semantics of illness in Iran. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 1(1): 25–58.
Gordon, Deborah. 1996. MDs' failure to use plain language can lead to courtroom. Canadian Medical Association Journal 155(8) (15 October): 1152–54.
Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: Speech acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
Hadlow, Jan, and Marian Pitts. 1991. The understanding of common health terms by doctors, nurses and patients. Social Science and Medicine 32: 193–96.
Hawkins, Anne Hunsacker. 1984. Two pathographies: A study in illness and literature. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9: 231–252.
Hawkins, Anne Hunsacker. 1993. Reconstructing illness: Studies in pathography. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press.
Hirschberg, Stephen E. 1985. Diagnosis: Chronic progressive abstrusity. Verbatim 11(3): 3–4.
Hojier, Harry, 1954. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In Language in culture, ed. G. Fraenkel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery. 1991. Doctors' stories: The narrative structure of medical knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Johnson, Diane, and John F. Murray. 1985. Do doctors mean what they say? In Fair of speech: The uses of euphemism, ed. D. J. Enright, 151–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kleinman, Arthur. 1973. Medicine's symbolic reality: On a central problem in the philosophy of medicine. Inquiry 16: 206–13.
Kleinman, Arthur. 1980. Patients and healers in the context of culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Klinkenborg, Verlyn. 1994. Dangerous diagnoses. The New Yorker 70(21) (July 18): 78–80 (review of Sheila Rothman, Living in the shadow of death and Alan M. Kraut, Silent travelers).
Landon, Lana Hartman. 1989. Suffering over time: Six varieties of pain. Soundings 72(1): 75–82.
Leukemia Society of America (LSA). August 1995. Myelodysplastic syndromes. New York.
Lewis, Gilbert. 1974. Gnau anatomy and vocabulary for illnesses. Oceania 45(1): 50–78.
Lopez Austin, Alfredo. 1988. The human body and ideology. Concepts of the ancient Nahuas, trans. Thelma and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Matisoff, James. 1978. Variational semantics in Tibeto-Burman. The “organic” approach to linguistic comparison. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
McCullough, Laurence B. 1989. The abstract character and transforming power of medical language. Soundings 72(1): 111–25.
Mishler, Elliot G. 1979. Meaning in context: Is there any other kind? Harvard Educational Review 49: 1–19.
Mishler, Elliot G. 1984. The discourse of medicine: Dialectics of medical interviews. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Moore, Thomas J. 1995. Deadly medicine. New York: Simon & Schuster.
National Cancer Institute. 1993/1997. State-of-the-art PDQ information for patients: Myelodysplastic syndromes. Bethesda, MD: National Cancer Institute (updated regularly).
The Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. 2d ed., prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ong, L. M. L., C. M. J. de Haes, A. M. Hoos, and F. B. Lammes. 1995. Doctor-patient communication: A review of the literature. Social Science and Medicine 40: 903–18.
Pendleton David and John Hasler, ed. 1983. Doctor-patient communication. New York: Academic Press.
Poirier, Suzanne, and Daniel J. Brauner. 1988. Ethics and the daily language of medical discourse. Hastings Center Report (August–September): 5–9.
Reichard, Gladys. 1943. Imagery in an Indian vocabulary. American Speech 9: 96–102.
Richter, Alan. 1993. Dictionary of sexual slang. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Rosenberg, Charles E. 1985. The therapeutic revolution: Medicine, meaning, and social change in 19th-century America. In Sickness and health in America, ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald Numbers, 39–52. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Rosenberg, Charles E. 1989. Discourse in history: Frames and framers. Milwaukee Quarterly 67(suppl. 1): 1–15.
Rosenberg, Charles E. 1992. Framing disease: Illness, society, and history. Hospital Practice 27(7): 179–191 (a reprint of the author's introduction to Farming disease: Studies in cultural history, ed. Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
Ross, Judith Wilson. 1989. The militarization of disease. Do we really want a war on AIDS? Soundings 72(1): 39–58.
Roux, Jean-Paul. 1988. Le Sang. Paris: Fayard.
Sacks, Oliver. 1993. A leg to stand on (with a new afterword by the author). New York: HarperCollins (originally published by Summit Books, 1984).
Sensenbrenner, Lyle L. 1995. Myelodysplastic syndromes. Oral presentation for patients (July, 1994 AAFA Annual Conference, transcription updated July, 1995). Baltimore: Aplastic Anemia Foundation of America.
Sontag, Susan. 1990. Illness as metaphor and AIDS and its metaphors. New York: Anchor Doubleday (Illness as metaphor first published 1978; AIDS and its metaphors 1989).
Staiano, Katherine Vance. 1986. Interpreting signs of illness. A case study in medical semiotics. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sweetser, Eve E. 1990. From etymology to pragmatics. Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tracy, David. 1987. Plurality and ambiguity: Hermeneutics, religion, hope. New York: Harper and Row.
Wailoo, Keith. 1997. Drawing blood: Technology and disease identity in 20th century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Warner, Richard. 1976. The relationship between language and disease concepts. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine 7: 57–68.
Weir, John, 1986. AIDS stories. Harpers (September): 20–26.
West, Candace. 1984. Routine complications: Troubles with talk between doctors and patients. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961. Tractatus logico-philologicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Young, Andrew. 1981. The anthropology of illness and sickness. Annual Review of Anthropology 11: 257–285.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fleischman, S. I am ... , I have ... , I suffer from ... : A Linguist Reflects on the Language of Illness and Disease. Journal of Medical Humanities 20, 3–32 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022918132461
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022918132461