A FEW years ago, a relative of ours approached us. Visibly shocked and absolutely nervous, he wanted some of us to go with him to a hospital where his father was admitted for a medical condition.

He said he was unable to understand what doctors were saying and from what he had gathered he believed his father was suffering from some ‘unknown’ disease and might die soon. When my brother accompanied him to the hospital, he was told by the doctors that the old man needed some medical tests to ascertain the nature of ailment. They thought the patient might just had had an angina attack. But the language in which the doctors were trying to communicate with the attendants was not only a fatal overdose of medical jargon but a perfect prescription for confusion: an ugly mixture of Urdu and English. Not very educated, he had mistaken ‘angina’ for ‘anjana’, an Urdu word meaning ‘unknown’.

Dr Ameen Gadit, a senior doctor and psychiatrist, has narrated in his book how the attendants of a patient started crying when a doctor asked the paramedics to give the patient some medicine “by mouth”, as there was some problem with administering the intravenous drip. The attendants thought the doctor had pronounced the imminent death of the patient since he had uttered “be maut” (an untimely or premature death).

In another tragic misunderstanding resulting from the use of undue medical jargon involved a very poor and illiterate family. A housemaid, commonly known as ‘maasi’, informed my wife that one of her children, quite advanced in age, was abnormal. When asked why they did not seek medical help earlier, she said they had gone to consult many doctors and were always told the child was “abnormal”. But we did not understand and quietly came back, puzzled and worried. After many years somebody explained what an abnormal child was. “Why did not doctors tell us in simple words?” she said.

Most of our medical students and doctors come from affluent or middle-class families and belong to an English-knowing background. Many of them unwittingly believe that everybody understands English, just like their family members or fellow students. But they must be taught during their education at medical colleges and universities that a large number of our population is illiterate and some of them may not understand Urdu well, let alone the medical terms uttered in a cross-breed of a language they think of as Urdu. But it is not Urdu, believe me! It is neither Urdu nor English. It is some kind of gibberish.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary says that jargon is “words or expressions used by a particular profession or group that are difficult for others to understand”. Though examples are not to be found in dictionaries, some of them may be quite interesting. For instance, ‘short leg’ and ‘square leg’ are neither legs nor short/square. They are simply fielding positions in a cricket ground. A ‘bug’ or ‘virus’ may ‘corrupt’ your ‘hard disk’, but none of these computer terms mean what they ordinarily do. But when it comes to medical jargon, it may be more confusing for the common people as doctors have to interact with non-technical persons all the time. So doctors must be more careful and patient while speaking to their patients. They must talk in a simple language, considering the social and/or educational background of patients.

Gone are the days when medical education was imparted in Urdu at Usmania University, Hyderabad (Deccan). A large number of books were written in Urdu on medical sciences. Seema Alavi’s book Islam and healing (2007) wonderfully tells us how in India books on medical science were written in Persian and Urdu and how the tide turned against the local knowledge and local professionals.

There have been some medical dictionaries too in Urdu. One of the earliest medical dictionaries written in Urdu was Lughat-i-Kabeer: Istilahaat-i-Tibbiya. It was compiled by Hakeem Mohammad Kabeer. Lahore’s Markazi Urdu Board (now renamed as Urdu Science Board) had published a medical dictionary in 1975. Compiled by Hakeem Mohammad Shareef Jam’ai, it was a voluminous, 1,100- page, meticulous work, listing thousands of medical terms in English with their Urdu equivalents. Another medical English-Urdu dictionary was compiled by Akhter Amritsari. Masood Ahmed Barkati revised it and the National Language Authority, renamed the National Lan­guage Promotion Depar­tment, published it in 1995.

Now a huge, two-volume English to Urdu dictionary of modern medical terms has been published by Karachi Unive­rsity’s Bureau of Compilation and Translation. This large-size, 1,526-page feat is compiled by Dr Syed Mohammad Aslam and consists of no less than 50,000 technical words and phrases relating to medical sciences. By any yardstick, it is a remarkable work that explains medical terms in chaste Urdu. In fact, Dr Aslam was known for his “pure” Urdu and he did not use a single English word in his columns that he wrote on medical issues in an Urdu newspaper. Dr Aslam, a heart specialist and author of many medical books, passed away last year.

One hopes that our doctors would benefit from this dictionary and talk to their patients in a language that is easily understood.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, January 22nd, 2019

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