Medical Terms in a Fictional Text

Abstract

    The article addresses medical terms in a selected fictional text (Noah Gordon’s novel The Physician, 2020), their features and functions. The text abounds in medical terms. They are usually used to describe various medical treatment related situations. The article focuses on two most prominent groups of terms: proper (scientific) medical terms and improper medical terms or pseudo-terms. It also describes the functions played by medical terms, the meaning of their contextual partners (adjectives, participles, verbs) in performing the stylistic function and addresses the topic of determinologization.
    When discussing the functioning of medical terms in the fictional text, the article also presents the insights of other scholars concerning the peculiarities of the use of terms in a given text and the proposed classifications of terms in the text.