This is a list of 25 medical words, taken from the three shows in the catalogue this vocabulary actually lives in: The Pitt, The Good Doctor and 9-1-1. Each entry gives the word, its part of speech, a one-line meaning, and one real line of dialogue from the episode it was found in.
What makes the list different from the other medical-English lists you will find is not the format. It is that these words were not chosen. They were counted. Nobody decided which words a learner ought to know and then wrote them down; every word of every episode was counted, and these are the ones the hospital shows say far more than the rest of television does. That is a claim about measurement rather than about teaching, and it is the claim the whole page rests on.
The result is useful for a particular kind of reader, and it is worth being honest about which one. This is the vocabulary of a hospital as it is spoken: the words that get said quickly, across a bed, to a colleague who is already moving. That is what a medical student on a ward has to follow, and what a nurse or a paramedic starting a job in English has to catch the first time, and it is not the same thing as a textbook glossary. A glossary is organised by anatomy or by system, and it is complete in a way this list is not. This one is organised by what actually gets said out loud, and it is incomplete in a way a glossary is not. Nothing here explains medicine, and none of it is medical advice. It explains the words that medicine is discussed in.
How the list was made
Nobody chose these words. A textbook glossary is somebody’s judgement about what a learner ought to know; this is a measurement of what gets said.
Wordspotting counts subtitles, every word of every episode in its catalogue. The question it then asks is narrower than frequency: not which words are common, but which ones a single corner of television says far more often than everywhere else. Words that behave that way together end up together. Nothing in the process knows what medicine is.
So no one decided a medical list should exist and then went looking for entries. The shows wrote it and the counting found it.
Two things follow from where it came from, and both are worth knowing before you read. These are emergency rooms and ambulances, so the vocabulary runs to bleeding, airways and broken bones rather than to chronic illness or general practice. And a fair number of the entries are ordinary English words carrying a clinical sense, which is why each is glossed against the line it was found in rather than against its everyday meaning. Those are the ones to slow down on.
The words
1.abdomennoun
the part of the body between the chest and the hips; the belly
“The abdomen is rigid.”The Pitt, S1E8
2.incisionnoun
a cut made into the body during an operation
“We can repair Wade's fistula and reverse his bypass all through a single incision.”The Good Doctor, S2E5
3.clotnoun
a lump of blood that has gone solid and can block a vessel
“Mrs. Torres, we're concerned about a possible blood clot in your leg that can lead to serious complications.”The Pitt, S2E11
4.cardiacadjective
to do with the heart
“The cardiac arrest was brought on by smoke inhalation.”9-1-1, S7E10
5.antibioticnoun
a medicine that kills bacteria and clears an infection
“You could just need antibiotics, or you could require an operation.”The Pitt, S2E8
6.swellingnoun
a part of the body that has grown larger than normal, usually from injury or illness
“If we can't reduce the swelling, she will have permanent brain damage.”The Good Doctor, S4E5
7.airwaynoun
the passage that carries air from the mouth and nose down to the lungs
“This is gonna keep her airway open.”9-1-1, S2E3
8.clampnoun
a surgical tool that pinches a blood vessel shut to stop bleeding
“It was amazing how you created arterial clamps out of pieces of an aluminum can.”The Good Doctor, S6E16
9.arterynoun
a tube that carries blood away from the heart to the rest of the body
“He is bleeding from his radial artery.”The Good Doctor, S6E16
10.cordnoun
the tube joining an unborn baby to its mother, cut at birth
“The umbilical cord is out.”9-1-1, S6E10
11.spinaladjective
to do with the spine, the line of bones running down the back
“After a fall like that, we can't rule out spinal injury.”9-1-1, S4E10
12.ruptureverb
to burst or tear open
“If it progresses, your uterus could rupture and we would lose the baby.”The Good Doctor, S6E10
13.complicationnoun
a further problem that develops out of an illness or an operation
“There's risk of complications, some quite serious.”The Good Doctor, S6E18
14.hemorrhagenoun
heavy bleeding, often inside the body
“A pelvic injury can lead to internal hemorrhaging.”9-1-1, S6E5
15.aneurysmnoun
a bulge in the wall of a blood vessel that may burst
“You have multiple cerebral aneurysms, which puts you in danger of a brain hemorrhage.”The Good Doctor, S6E20
16.ultrasoundnoun
a scan that uses sound waves to make a picture inside the body
“And Claire showed excellent judgment ordering the ultrasound, so I would like her to join us.”The Good Doctor, S4E16
17.syndromenoun
a group of symptoms that appear together and make up a named condition
“Your antiphospholipid syndrome makes a long surgery extremely dangerous.”The Good Doctor, S1E4
18.salinenoun
salt water, given through a drip to replace lost body fluid
“Infusing another liter of saline.”The Good Doctor, S7E2
19.fracturenoun
a break or crack in a bone
“There's a fracture down by the ankle.”The Pitt, S2E8
20.fluidnoun
liquid in the body, here liquid collecting where it should not be
“Your lungs are filling with fluid and secretions.”The Good Doctor, S4E1
21.diagnosisnoun
the doctor's conclusion about which illness a patient has
“She came to the same diagnosis, Shaun.”The Good Doctor, S1E18
22.bowelnoun
the intestine, the long tube food passes through after the stomach
“The telescoped bowel is causing a blockage.”The Good Doctor, S3E2
23.dischargeverb
to let a patient leave the hospital
“Finish up so I can discharge him.”The Good Doctor, S3E19
24.elevatedadjective, from the verb elevate
raised above the normal level, said of a reading or a test result
“Heart rate's elevated.”9-1-1, S6E7
25.dialysisnoun
a treatment that cleans the blood by machine when the kidneys have failed
“When was his last dialysis?”The Pitt, S2E12
What the textbooks list and the shows do not say
Every list like this one has a shadow: the words a medical-English textbook would have taught you instead. Those went through the same counting this list came out of, and the comparison is the most useful thing on this page.
They are not absent. They are swamped. Auscultation is not said once in the entire catalogue, and prophylaxis and etiology barely register above it. The ones that do get said are drowned by their spoken equivalents: these shows say cardiac about twenty times for every infarction, artery ten times for every hypertension, and antibiotic something like seventy times for every contraindication.
The reason is not that television avoids the subject. It is that the textbook and the ward use different registers for the same thing. Textbooks teach the Greco-Latin written form, and the people in the room say the plain one. Dyspnea on the page, airway out loud. Myocardial infarction on the page, cardiac out loud. The written form is what appears in a chart, a paper and an exam, so learning it was not a mistake. It is just not the form anyone reaches for with a patient in front of them.
That is a more useful thing for a learner to know than any single word on this page. Someone who studied the textbook list has not learned the wrong subject. They have learned the wrong register of the right subject, and that is a much harder problem to notice, because every word they know is correct and none of them are the words being said. A ward finds it out for them in about an hour. The list above is the other register, and it is the one that gets spoken.
How to actually remember them
A list read once does very little. You will recognise a few of these words tomorrow and lose most of the rest by the weekend, which is not a failure of attention. It is what a word does when it has been met exactly once, in a column, with nothing attached to it.
What makes a word stay is meeting it again in something you were going to watch anyway. If you watch hospital shows, the repetition is already there, because these are the words those shows say over and over, which is precisely why they were the ones the counting returned. Read the list, then watch an episode and count how many of them go past you.
That is also the honest argument for the tool the counting came from. Wordspotting finds the words you do not know in a show you are about to watch and teaches them to you first. It is the same method as this page, run on the episode you already had open.
