Physician

Meanings of the word physician

In modern English, the term physician is used in two main ways, with relatively broad and narrow meanings respectively.

This is often confusing, especially to non-physicians. These meanings and variations are listed below.

Physician = any medical practitioner

Main article: Medicine

Physician in the broad sense, usually in North America, now applies to any legally qualified and licensed practitioner of medicine. In the United States, the term physician is now commonly used to describe any medical doctor holding the degrees of Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) or Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine. The American Medical Association, established 1847, uses physician in this broad sense to describe all its members.

Physician = specialist (or subspecialist) in internal medicine

Main article: Internal medicine

Physician is still widely used in an older, narrow sense, especially outside North America. In this usage, a physician is a specialist in internal medicine or one of its many sub-specialties (especially as opposed to a specialist in surgery). This traditional meaning of physician still conveys a sense of expertise in treatment by drugs or medications, rather than by the procedures of surgeons.^[4]

This older usage is at least six hundred years old in English; physicians and surgeons were once members of separate professions, and traditionally were rivals. The Shorter OED, third edition, gives a Middle English quotation making this contrast, from as early as 1400:

Henry VIII granted a charter to the London Royal College of Physicians in 1518, and granted the Company of Barber/Surgeons (ancestor of the Royal College of Surgeons) its separate charter in 1540. In the same year, the same English monarch established the Regius Professorship of Physic at the University of Cambridge.^[5] Newer universities would probably describe such an academic as a professor of internal medicine. Hence, in the 16th century, physic meant roughly what internal medicine does now.

These days, a specialist physician in this older, narrow sense would probably be described in the United States as a internist. The older, narrow usage of physician as an internist is common in Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, Japan, South Africa, India, Indonesia, Republic of China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and Hong Kong. In such places, the terms doctor or medical practitioner are prevalent, to describe any practitioner of medicine (whom an American would likely call a physician, in the newer, broad sense).^[6] In Commonwealth countries, specialist paediatricians and geriatricians are also described as specialist physicians who have subspecialized by age of patient rather than by organ system.

Physician and Surgeon

On both sides of the Atlantic, the combined term “Physician and Surgeon” is a venerable way to describe either a general practitioner, or else any medical practitioner irrespective of specialty.^[1][4] This usage still shows the older, narrow meaning of physician and preserves the old difference between a physician, as a practitioner of physic, and a surgeon. The term may be used by state medical boards in the USA, and by equivalent bodies in provinces of Canada, to describe any medical practitioner.