Opinion Christmas 2025
A dictionary for medicine’s unnamed moments
Matt Morgan
BMJ 2025; 391 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r2476 (Published 01 December 2025)Cite this as: BMJ 2025;391:r2476
Matt Morgan shares some words that capture what medicine feels like when no ICD code will do
Words matter. In medicine, they act as scalpel and suture. They are the only operating instruments we carry into every conversation. They diagnose, they console, they bind people together in the aftermath. And they also shape how we see ourselves.
In September, I wrote a column in The BMJ about how I was starting my own medical lexicon (https://thedictionaryofbloodandsilence.com/). Here, I invite you to read this selection of 25 of these neologisms crafted for the unspoken experiences of doctors and healthcare workers. Every day between 1 and 25 December, a new word will appear in the infographic. Some are thoughtful. Some are quietly humorous. All are honest.
Since I began creating and sharing these words, I’ve been contacted by other doctors who’ve coined their own. Among the many submissions to my strange dictionary of medical feelings was one that arrived from a place I didn’t know about at the time: a care home in Cornwall, where Barry Pettit was receiving palliative care. A general practitioner for three decades, he had spent a lifetime helping others make sense of illness, yet in his final weeks he reached once more for the language of medicine—coining the fourth word in this list. His daughter later wrote to tell me he had died before he could read my reply. Knowing now the circumstances in which he submitted his word lends it a profound and humbling force. It is a reminder that behind every clinical definition sits a human story, and sometimes the person who teaches us the most about the experience of illness is a colleague who has just crossed its threshold themselves. I hope his addition is a fitting tribute to him.
I wanted to start this dictionary to make a record of previously unnamed moments: the first breath after resuscitation, the gloves snapping on at 3 am, the way light falls across an empty bed.
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,”said Ludwig Wittgenstein. Medicine proves this daily. We can name hundreds of anaesthetic agents, surgical manoeuvres, pathological signs, but we don’t yet have a name for the moment you care for a patient who shares your mother’s name (Matronymosis). Without language for an experience, it remains an unprocessed weight—something carried but never unpacked. These moments become private ghosts that may continue to haunt us. But when spoken or written, they lose their power to hurt or scare us.
Naming these moments is not indulgence. It’s clinical housekeeping for the soul. When our language shrinks, the human side of medicine begins to suffocate. We risk lexical ischaemia, a narrowing of meaning caused by semantic rust. The result will be a corrosion of care born from what we cannot name. There is something quietly liberating in discovering a word for an experience you’ve felt all your life but never spoken. It whispers: you are not alone.
This is not a dictionary of pathology. It is a shared language for those who have walked the coded corridors of hospitals, and carried home the scent, the silence, and the strange music of a shift. If medicine is about care, then naming the unnameable is part of that care—for patients, for colleagues, and for the quiet places inside ourselves that deserve recognition.
These words have been made to tell you: you’re not the only one who’s felt this. We are all a little lost—and naming it is how we begin to find our way.
Readers can view the full infographic at https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26069714/
1st. Beeperphantom
Hearing your pager go off when it has not
2nd. Breathchase
The desperate rhythm of trying to coax air back into someone slipping away
3rd. Cursorcrawl
The glacial pace of an ancient hospital computer waking up, during which you can measure time in heartbeats and watch your clinical urgency slowly evaporate
4th. Devastdiscernment
The sudden realisation that the illness you are contemplating in a detached, professional way is actually happening to you. Submitted by Barry Pettit
5th. Exitcall
The pager going off just as you’re about to leave for the day
6th. Farsilence
The distant quiet you hear on a ward at 3 am, knowing it can shatter at any second
7th. Glancecode
The silent exchange of looks between staff when things turn serious
8th. Glovelock
That flash of panic when you can’t get a glove off quickly
9th. Gownsnap
The satisfying rip and shrug of removing a surgical gown
10th. Hospibrew
The distinctive hospital smell of equal parts reheated food and human waste
11th. Lifespill
The moment you realise a patient has just told you something they have never told anyone else
12th. Mentorclench
The mix of pride and anxiety while watching a junior attempt a first procedure
13th. Nameghost
The sudden intimacy of caring for a patient who shares a loved one’s name
14th. Passnesia
The sudden mental blackout when trying to log in to a hospital computer you’ve used daily for years, as if the password has been surgically removed from your memory
15th. PlotTwistitis
The sudden rewrite of a patient’s story when a new diagnosis appears
16th. Radiloom
The suspended moment between ignorance and revelation while an x ray loads
17th. Rosterosis
The creeping malaise that sets in when the new rota drops into your inbox and you immediately start bargaining with your future self
18th. Scrubswim
The restless slipping and sagging of scrubs that do not fit
19th. Shiftdrift
The feeling of hours blending together until you’re not sure which day you’re in
20th. Stickscape
The miniature hell of adhesive that refuses to peel the way you want
21st. Stilltone
The thick, absolute quiet in the room when you certify a death
22nd. Storyhold
Keeping a patient’s life story in your head so you can tell it for them when they no longer can
