Medical Words Throughout History

In this chapter, we will analyze two aspects of the medical word in the history of medicine: the first has to do with the role of the word in the doctor–patient relationship throughout history. Pedro Laín Entralgo, one of the most important historians of medicine, published in the middle of the twentieth century The Healing Through the Word, analyzing the aspects of the word in the doctor–patient relationship throughout the history of medicine. Today the doctor’s word seems to be undervalued; however, even current texts such as Deep Medicine by Eric Topol emphasize the importance of listening and the medical word in current medicine. In this topic, we will focus on the current medical role as an expert in synthesizing the complexity of medical information into understandable knowledge for a person in the community. The second of the aspects is that the history of medicine is also the history of the words that compose it. We will see how there is a nucleus of words that can have a different meaning when they are used in a technical way or in a common way: for example, the word positive in everyday life often has a favorable connotation, while in oncology or infectology, the word positive (biopsy positive, HIV positive) usually has an unfavorable connotation. The interesting thing about the search for the origin of these terms is that we can find a meaning that broadens our perspective and allows us to communicate better with our patients. Especially if we consider that the doctor masters about 20,000 terms that are foreign to most patients and their families. At this point, we will deepen the teaching role of the doctor in the consultation to ensure that the patient understands in his own words the clinical situation in which he finds himself and the treatment alternatives he has.