Medical lexicon: what's your complaint?
Pria Anand:
The term complaint seems to have entered the medical lexicon even earlier than deny, first documented in a seventeenth-century monograph on surgery in which patients “complain” of everything from vertigo to blindness to “an ill night’s rest.” The language of medicine still reduces patients’ symptoms to “complaints,” as though they are something as petty as a biting Yelp review — as if to suggest that a more stoic person would bear them without complaint, that to endorse them is a form of weakness. In the language of medicine, a chief complaint is what brings a person to the hospital — a headache or chest pain. The terms deny and complaint are diametrically opposed — one to refuse a symptom, the other to claim it — but both are a form of judgment. The lexicon is combative, suggesting that patients and doctors are adversaries in the labor of healing.
The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of our Brains, pp. 144f
