City Hospital Tuberculosis Division, Seattle, 1927 via Seattle Municipal Archives
Rereading my notes from Susan Sontag’s book Illness as Metaphor, I was struck by the following connection. Sontag writes:
Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades … The metaphorized illnesses that haunt the collective imagination are all hard deaths, or envisaged as such. Being deadly is not in itself enough to produce terror.
She’s right on the etymology. The infinitely reliable Oxford English Dictionary gives the low-down:
patient, adj. and n. Anglo-Norman and Middle French pacient, patient (French patient)… (noun) sick person (14th cent.), person who undergoes an action (c1380) and its etymon classical Latin patient-, patins able or willing to endure or undergo, capable of enduring hardship, long-suffering, tolerant (in post-classical Latin also as noun, person who endures (5th cent.)
I find the etymology of “patient” fascinating — almost liberating — because it is so at odds with the modern notion of a patient. In our current vernacular, “patient” has come to signify someone who is sick in a medical sense, a person who has some kind of biomedical abnormality. But the historical context of the word reminds us that it is not sickness which defines a patient but suffering.
Isn’t this a wonderful reminder of what modern medicine should really be about? I think doctors, nurses, and all others in the medical field (including humble volunteers like myself!) would be helped by remembering that our ultimate goal is not to defeat a pathogen, to fix a physiological irregularity, to cure a disease. Though these are indeed lofty aims, they are all merely means for us to accomplish our true goal — to alleviate or eliminate suffering.
