The Language of Nursing

THE WORLD OF MEDICINE holds a strong fascination for the American imagination, always eager to explore and uncover the life-sustaining secrets and learned vocabulary of the profession. In the 1930s and 1940s, young Doctors Kildare and Malone charmed movie and radio audiences by displaying their rapidly growing medical wisdom. Recent movie renditions of hospital life put on the screen, in full color and with varying fidelity to realism, the horrors and honors of treating the sick. Television, too, has taken the layman into the corridors and wards of numerous hospitals; Medical Center, General Hospital, Dr. Kildare, The Nurses, Emergency, The Little People, Temperatures Rising, Marcus Welby, Police Surgeon, The Doctors, and M*A*S*H have in the last ten or fifteen years found in medical practice, or fabricated from it, diverse narratives eagerly received by the viewing public. In all of these programs, the RN 'registered nurse' plays a role, sometimes brief and undistinguished, sometimes major and powerful. Because nurses (both male and female) are indispensable hospital employees, their language arouses interest too.' But, however much television scripts strive for fidelity, they can never approximate the breadth, the versatility, and the ingenuity of the nurse's lingo. Indeed, scholarship itself has not fully or even adequately examined the nurse's language.2 Linguistic

Linguistics · Sociology · Medicine · Nursing · Nursing Education, Practice, and Leadership · Psychology · Philosophy

• Variation in the organization of medical terms

  Lynne Bowker, Shane Hawkins•Terminology International Journal…•2006

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• English for Medical Purposes

  Open Access•John C Maher, John Maher•Language Teaching•1986

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