5. Floccillation: Malaria sufferers experience quick rises and falls in temperature, so I imagine that such patients exhibit floccillation, which is the delirious picking at bedclothes “as though plucking cotton from them.” This may not be the case with malaria (what the hell do I know) but apparently the behavior pattern accompanies severe fevers and I suspect (what the hell do I know) that the patient is moved to do this in the hope of reducing their body temperature.
However the Internet tells me that floccillation is definitely observed in typhoid and typhus fevers where delirious muttering, muscular twitching and “picking at imaginary objects” are common. apparently medical experts have observed that the death of Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry V consists of a vivid description of the typhoid state. How Shakespeare knew of this and why he cared is hard to say.
6. Gork: It’s clear that medical matters make good drama. Nevertheless, when you watch TV dramas like ER, House, Grey’s Anatomy et al, you rarely if ever encounter a gork. The underlying premise of these programs is “the health service triumphant”. The medical maestros who grace these programs with their surgical antics are blessed with clinical omniscience. Their initial diagnosis may not be spot on, but in the end they identify the deadly disease or sickly syndrome and happily eradicate it.
House is the TV program that comes closest to portraying a gork, since every episode involves House and his diagnostic team focussing their attention on a potential gork, but in the end the gork turns out to be a “hork”. A gork is a patient whose complaint is never truly identified – and it’s one of the few words in pour language that’s an ancronym. It stands for “god only really knows.” In the surreal TV world of Gregory House, this is transformed into “House only really knows.”
7. Perissotomist: House, bless his heart, is not a perissotomist, in fact he rarely enters the operating theater because he’s not a surgeon.
Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit – Life!
Well said, Emily Dickinson. A perissotomist is the kind of surgeon you hope never to encounter. A perissotomist is a knife-happy surgeon – the kind of practitioner who is a cut or two above the rest. There is scant information available on this word, partly I guess, because it is used only in circumstances where a surgeon is inclined to carry out “ectomies” inappropriately or even accidentally. (I don’t know whether “ectomies” ever happen accidentally, but if you wake up from an operation to discover that you’ve experienced an accidental orchidectomy, my advice is to sue the perissotomist responsible.)
8. Orchidectomy: It’s also sometimes spelt orchiectomy, but I prefer to spell this word with the ‘d’ intact, because it sounds like a procedure you might implement on a garden that has too many flowers of a given variety. Etymologically, the word “orchid” derives from the Greek word for testicle, most likely because the bulb of an orchid is testicular in shape. So technically, orchidectomy is about the removal of one or two testicles – a procedure that is sometimes necessary in cases of testicular cancer and prostate cancer and always necessary when one is promoted to oversee a sheik’s harem.
9. Philiater: A philiater is someone who is deeply interested in the study of medicine. The term can thus be used to describe medical students but it also applies to amateurs. Given the medical information currently available on the Internet one could maintain that many of us are philiaters now, at least where our own health is concerned. It must be galling to the medical profession, who once were the sole custodians of medical knowledge, to have a digital second opinion, sitting there waiting to be consulted, out on the Internet. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing of course, but there is a clear upside.
For example, when one hears in a US TV advert that the side effects of a drug for rheumatoid arthritis include “liver disease, lymphoma and death”, one is overwhelmed with a desire to visit the Internet just to find out that it wasn’t a joke. And by the way, for those living outside the US, it isn’t. There really are such prescription drugs with such side-effects.
10. Iatrogenic: The ‘iater’ in philiater come from the same etymological root as the ‘iatro’ in iatrogenic. It refers to “doctor.’’ As an adjective it means “induced by the words or actions of the physician.” Cures are thus usually iatrogenic, but there are also illnesses that are iatrogenic in a bad way. There are also iatrogenic deaths. Each year, over 750,000 people in the United States die in this way with about 100,000 of them occur from prescription drugs. The most recent famous victim: Michael Jackson.
10 Curse Words You Don’t Know
10 Insulting Words You Don’t Know
10 Nonsense Words You Don’t Know
10 Words You Don’t Know With Limericks
10 Units of Measure You Don’t Know
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~ Salvador Dali
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