The beauty of medical language

The clinical language is so dry that it sticks in my throat like the grits they used to serve in our hospital cafeteria. Case reports will never again read like Sir William Osler's description of endocarditis lesions: “For the great majority of the cases of the primary form, the term ‘ulcerative’ hardly expresses the precise anatomical condition. Once, in an earlier iteration of our EMR, I reached the character limit when trying to elaborate a patient with a knot of cardiac, endocrine, renal, and pulmonary conditions, all of which had reached a severe stage. With whatever shrinking free-text allotments clinicians are still permitted, we can slip in the café-au-lait spots, the port-wine stains, and the palpable thrills (the G-rated cardiac kind), and appreciate the honeyed syllables of cystocoeles and cyanosis.