Give us some nurses who speak English

This story appeared in the Nov. 26, 1989, edition of the Lewiston Tribune.

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How inconsistent it is that those kind people who work at St. Joseph’s hospital at Lewiston would be so gentle with moms and newborn babes and then turn right around and savage a nice little language like English.

They are redesigning the obstetrics ward to let the moms wait through labor and have the babes in the same room. But they are remodeling hospital terminology as well. Obstetrics — the name by which we have known the baby department all our lives — is suddenly the “department of family beginnings.”

Frankly, that sounds more like the conception bed than the department that delivers the goods.

Or is it even earlier than that? The department of family beginnings could be a wedding chapel.

Why must we keep changing tried and true names in this society? Why must we take a friendly old name like obstetrics — the name the customers have always known — and turn it over to the Cute Squad to come up with some drippy new handle that will confuse us for a generation before we all learn it?

A revolution is under way in our mother tongue. Before long, everyone in the world will speak English. But we will soon be taking courses in how to speak the various pockets of English. We will be translating among groups of English speakers.

For instance, we will need a translator to speak to the patient care services in St. Joe’s department of family beginnings.

I guess that’s what we call nurses now. The report on the new department name noted that nursing will now be called “patient care services.”

Why? Nursing is an honorable name, instantly recognized by the customers. And nurses deserve better than the anonymity this trendy change will buy their profession.

Let me make it clear that this patient is not impatient with changing the name of nursing to patient care services because of any trouble with nurses. Indeed, during my stay in that increasingly groovy hospital, this patient never had his care serviced any better.

But that was back when they still spoke English at St. Joseph’s. I’m not so sure that would be the case now. Once they start changing to snobbish words, there’s no end to it.

What if you asked for a glass of water and all they had was a patient moistening container?

What if you asked for a sleeping pill and all the patient servicer had was a nocturnal somnolence inducer?

These medical bureaucrats who have declared war on an innocent language will take us to the day when the alarmed relatives of a dying patient will run into the hall yelling, “Patient care servicer! Patient care servicer!”

And if obstetrics is now the department of family beginnings, then one presumes the hospice will soon be known as the department of family endings.

I can see it coming:

When a person who doesn’t speak English is taken with an injury or illness to the hospital, the hospital normally summons a translator to help that person tell the medical people where it hurts. But in the future, we will all require the same service. Indeed, hospitals will soon have interpreters on the staff to translate Medical into English and English back into Medical.

Of course, they won’t call them interpreters. That would be too easy for the customers to understand. They will call them medical terminology intercourse facilitators.

And then the day will come when the family fertilizer unit will want to find the department of family beginnings so he can visit the completed fetus expelled by the offspring incubation device to which he is married.

But he will be unable to find the babe because all he knows how to say is, “Nurse, where is obstetrics?”