Language and Medicine

Hi friends, this section I will discuss about the area of discourse analysis. In this occasion, I will explain about the expert of Language and Medicine. The expert is Suzanne Fleischman, a distinguished philologist, linguist and a internationally recognized Professor, Fleischman earned a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan in 1969. Received her MA in Spanish from UC Berkeley in 1971 and her PhD in Romance Philology at UC Berkeley  in 1975.

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://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n81099430/

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2000/02/02-04-2000.html

https://lg411.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/discourse-analysis-full.pdf

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/432204/summary

http://philpapers.org/s/Suzanne%20Fleischman