English for Medical Purposes: A Review

Abstract

Medical Linguistics is relatively a quite new field to work with. Working on the language of medicine has stimulating challenges to medical practitioners/historians and to linguistics. Though a lot of efforts have been made by classical scholars to do linguistic analysis of the ancient medical literature very minutely, but then from the middle ages until quite recently the field was quite ignored by scholars, consequently a little has been done to identify and work towards English Language Competencies in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing and for medical practitioners. This paper draws a brief review on the history and salient features of the English language used in medical industry, and discusses why English has become lingua franca for global transactions in medicine. It also draws an outline of the issues which generally may arise when medical practitioners differ in terms of language competencies at a workplace. And then the paper suggests some steps that can be followed by the manufacturers and the practitioners to ensure common minimum standards for communication for the staff members.