This book is about words. It is about the ways in which words are used, about the ways in which those words are put together, by doctors, medical scientists and others who write on medical matters. These ways are mostly no different from the ways that words are used and misused in many other subjects. But, in our opinion, too many of the producers and consumers of academic medical English are tolerant of writing that is clumsy, inaccurate, obscure or just downright bad; writing that is not, as Karl Popper demanded, simple, clear and modest. [We must note that Karl Popper’s entreaty dates from 1961, when his ‘fellow men’ probably were mostly men, and when sexism in language was barely recognized. The OED records the first use of sexist as 1965.]

The first section of this book examines briefly the roots of that tolerance; the remainder and larger part deals with the nuts and bolts of writing, taking its numerous examples from the field of medicine.

Our approach is to encourage good writing by examining bad writing, because it is often easier to say what is bad about a piece of writing than what is good. This sentiment is shared by Bernard Dixon, who compiled a collection of unarguably well-written scientific articles from past and present. In his preface, he says of bad writing, ‘We can learn important lessons by inspecting such specimens, just as pathologists learn from even the most unattractive objects and tissues that arrive in their laboratories.’ This book contains collections of these specimens and a record of their dissections.