The novelist, poet, and translator Lydia Davis 3 describes how she would, in her translation of Marcel Proust's famously long sentences in À la recherche du temps perdu ( In Search of Lost Time), attend to fidelity through reproducing, when she could, the sounds of the original. Which resident or student these days knows what the boogie-woogie is (let alone how to play it)? I believe we need to take more care with words in medicine, 2 and here we can take inspiration from those who deal carefully with words every day: writers, especially those traveling across language differences. Dock also offered some alternative suggestions, such as “boogy woogy.” 1Īs these wonderful words demonstrate, not only do phrases need to make the right sounds, but their meaning matters as well. One teacher taught his learners that it didn't actually matter which word they asked their patients to say, as long as it produced a lot of tremor. The Dutch played with sounds to find the right word. Some teachers I spoke with in Maastricht, however, said that the southern, softer Dutch accent didn't produce the right kind of resonance when this number was spoken, and they suggested that the students use an alternative word- Amsterdam-which produced nice, deep tones in the chest cavity. In the Netherlands, where the instruction was predominantly Dutch, undergraduate students were taught a different number: 88, or achtentachtig. As a patient declared during a ward round I observed, “Always 99, never 100!” I have no doubt it is still used elsewhere, too, judging from the physical examination videos I have found online that recommend the technique. The use of 99 was still prolific in Australian hospitals and medical schools, as it was during my days as a medical student. I was doing anthropological fieldwork, examining the role of sound and listening in contemporary medicine as part of a larger project on sonic skills across professions, based in Maastricht, the Netherlands. 1 In 2013, I spent 6 months observing medical students being taught the respiratory examination in medical schools in the Netherlands and Australia. Dock showed, through elaborate testing with microphones and graph paper, how the English 99 did not create the necessary vibrations required for an appropriate physical examination.įour decades after Dock's outcry, and despite the frenzied pace of evidence-based medicine, the “queer linguistic baggage” of 99 persists.
With passionate argumentation, he asserted that 99 was a too-literal translation of the German 99- neun und neunzig-that touring English doctors had observed during their travels being used on German and Austrian hospital wards. Few, however, question the reasons for 99, assuming the singsong-like nature of the phrase has some relevant sonic qualities.īack in 1973, in an article published in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, the physician William Dock 1 protested in horror that 99 was inappropriate for physical examination. Doctors learn and teach how to ask patients to repeat the number over and over and over again while feeling/listening for tactile vocal fremitus and whispered pectoriloquy. “Ninety-nine, ninety-nine, niiinetee-niiine.” For centuries, English-speaking doctors the world over have been taught this magical number.
0 kommentar(er)
