Fleischman
produced ground-breaking work in Romance and general linguistics that was
widely influential. Her undergraduate degree was from the University of
Michigan, where she specialized in Spanish, graduating summa cum laude
in 1969. Received her Ph.D. in Romance Philology at Berkeley, in 1975, working
under the direction of the renowned Romance linguist Yakov Malkiel. Her
dissertation, “The French Suffix as a function of extra-linguistic factors, A
revised version was published as Volume 86 of the University of California
Publications in Linguistics under the title Cultural and Linguistic Factors
in Word Formation: An Integrated Approach to the Development of the Suffix -age
(Berkeley: University of California Press). The design and implementation of
this project owed much to Malkiel’s intellectual style, but Fleischman soon
emancipated herself from her mentor’s influence. She had taught at UC Berkeley
since 1975.
Fleischman had been working on the cross-linguistic
analysis of the grammaticalization of like
and on a book integrating her own experience after being diagnosed in 1993 with
myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder known as MDS. Devoted her energies
to studying, understanding and clarify in analyses of the relationship between Language and medicine. A collection
of her work is currently being prepared for publication by Eve Sweetser and Dan
Slobin (both at University of California at Berkeley).
Languages of Medicine
Medical
language is the occupational register of physicians and it is largely opaque outside
the medical community. Several authors have commented on one particular feature
of medical language. McCullough (1989) see medical lan guage as an abstract
discourse about disease and organs and emphasize its distancing function, an
artifact of its commitment to objectivity. Crookshank (1923), Cassell(1976), and
Fleischman (1999) have commented on the lexicalisation of diseases as static
entities rather than dynamic processes (Fleischman ,475).
Grammatical and syntactic features
· Reporting verbs, e.g. The patient reported severe
side-effects.
• Non-temporal use of Tenses
(Present, Past mostly), e.g. He goes to hospital tomorrow.
• Passive, e.g. It should be
noted that phase-contrast not useful with fixed and stained material.
• Modals, e.g. It must have
been Tuesday when she went to the doctor’s.
• Conditional
expressions, e.g. If she falls over, she’ll hurt herself.
Metaphors in medicine
Metaphors
are also one of the lexical features of the language of medicine. There may be
identified (1) the kinds of metaphors used to structure medical concepts and (2)
the functions of metaphorical expressions in medical texts (didactic and
theory-constitutive). Particular importance are didactic metaphors as they refer
to doctor-patient communication. The
dominant conceptual metaphor in American culture is that disease is an outrage
and
-
"Medicine is war". Fighting disease is emphasized rather than
caring for sick patients. This metaphor entails that action is a virtue, -
doctors are fighters, technologies are
weapons and disease is the enemy. The language of medicine assigns
physicians an active role and patients. Another
major conceptual metaphor of biomedicine is - "the body
is a machine". According to this view, the individual is seen as the sum
of the body’s parts, e.g. "The heart is a pump", "The digestive
system is plumbing", "The brain is a computer", "A cell is
a machine", and "Cells contain machinery". In virtually every language
and every culture body parts serve as metaphors. They come to stand for perceived
physical or mental states, such as eat your heart out!, he hasn’t a leg to
stand on, it makes my blood boil, she gets under my skin, get off my back!, or in your face – all based on
associative meanings that attach to the respective body parts in English. Some
of these across languages and across cultures. (Fleischman 2003, 484-488; 125-127).
Languages for medical
In the last 30 years of the twentieth century,
English has been rapidly exported from and imported into many languages through
the dominant role of the U.S. in computer science and technology as well as
medical technology. So, in addition there is knowing the current mix of
standard English from all scientific and technological sources, including new
acronyms, Biochemistry, cell and molecular
biology, and bioengineering are the chief sources for the flood of new terms
entering the medical dictionaries. According July 24, 1995, article in US News
and World Report, about 25,000 new English words are coined every year, of which
4% make it into dictionaries. The catching up with English goes on continually in
native languages, by either finding adequate native words, borrowing from English,
or adapting English word to
native languages.
Medical communication
The
Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word ‘communicate’ comes from the
Latin ‘to share’. ‘Communication’ is
imparting, conveying or exchanging ideas, knowledge, etc.
-
Reassurance
-
To form and maintain relationships
-
To convey feelings
-
To persuade
-
To make decisions
-
To give information
-
To alleviate distress
- To solve problems
Works by Suzanne Fleischman
- Suzanne Fleischman (1999). I
Am ... , I Have ... , I Suffer From ... : A Linguist Reflects on the Language
of Illness and Disease. Journal of Medical Humanities 20
(1):3-32.
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— the “linguistic construction” of disease
(what's in a name?); the “translation” of biomedical information from the
specialists'
- Suzanne Fleischman (1990). Philology,
Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval Text. Speculum
65 (1):19-37.
Philology,
as Stephen Nichols suggests in his introductory remarks, has come to be equated
in the minds of many with a dessicated and dogmatic textual praxis which,
through the minutious methodologies of paleography, historical grammar, and the
textual criticism has reduced medieval
literary “monuments” to the status of “documents.” The Oxford Roland, in my
initial philological encounter with it.
- Suzanne
Fleischman
(1999). Call for Papers for Special Issue of the Journal of
Medical Humanities : Medicine and the Humanities: The Pedagogical Landscapeâ. Journal of Medical
Humanities
20 (4):293-294.
Suzanne Fleischman wrote and
edited five books
1. Cultural and Linguistic
Factors in Word Formation: An Integrated Approach to the Development of the
Suffix '-age', University of California Publications in Linguistics 86, Univ.
of California Press (1987)
2. The Future in Thought and Language:
Diachronic Evidence from Romance, Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 35,
Cambridge UP (1982)
3. Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval
Performance to Modern Fiction, Univ. of Austin Press (1990);
4. Discourse Pragmatics and the
Verb: The Evidence from Romance, ed. with Linda R. Waugh, Routledge, Chapman
& Hall (1991);
5. Modality in Grammar and
Discourse, ed. with Joan L. Bybee, Benjamins (1995)
·
Article “Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval Text,” pp. 19-37, Philology issue of Speculum (vol. 64, no. 1, 1990).
·
Article comparing the English marker
“like” with the French “genre”: “Des jumeaux du discours,” La Linguistique
34 (1998), no. 2, pp. 31-47, 1983), pp. 278-310.
·
“On the Representation of History and Fiction in the Middle Ages,” History
and Theory 23
· A Discourse Strategy of Oral Narrative,”Berkeley
Linguistic Studies 12 (1986), pp. 108-23
- During
her career, Fleischman earned numerous honors. They included; Fulbright,
Guggenheim, American Council of Learned Societies and French government
fellowships, as well as a 1995 medal of honor for research from the University
of Helsinki. She was invited to deliver the Zaharoff lectures in French studies
at Oxford University last year(1999). --
What we can learn from
her ?
Fleischman, 51, died at Alta Bates Medical
Center in Berkeley February 2, 2000. Last December, she still gave a lecture on language and medicine at Sinai
Hosptial New York. She had taught at UC
Berkeley since 1975. She was an extraordinary
classroom teacher;lecture, combining a theoretical habit of mind with
rigorously practical analysis in lectures that were models of clarity. She
developing a reputation that drew graduate students from around the world who
were eager for the opportunity to work with her, not just in her linguistic
work but also in frank face-to-face
evaluations of her students’ qualities
of mind.
Colleagues and friends recall she as an athletic, joyful,witty friend and a
dedicated professor. In the past several years she devoted her energies to
studying. Suzanne Fleischman was a great and her ironic viewpoint enlivened any
gathering. She left behind not just stunned and saddened colleagues, but
students who were counting on her brilliance and wisdom to guide them through
their studies. Her absence left a gap in the lives of all those who valued her
love of language, her intellectual, her warmth, she shared with us for all too
short time.
References:
http://philpapers.org/s/Suzanne%20Fleischman
