The Dictionary of Blood and Silence

A lexicon for the moments medicine forgot to name

Do you want to find a word for the unwordable? There’s a calming magic in learning there’s a word for something you’ve felt all your life but never shared aloud. A word that tells you: you’re not alone, you’re not broken, you’re human.
In medicine, this moment can be life-giving. Our working vocabulary is vast when it comes to blood gases, imaging reports, or antibiotic cover—but paper-thin when it comes to the experiences that quietly shape who we are: the sound of a mask seal breaking, the surreal drift of a 3 a.m. ward, the sudden weight of news you don’t want to give.

Who am I?

Dr Matt Morgan (verb) — To turn the sharp edges of medicine into something human-shaped; to write, whether in the BMJ or in books like Critical, One Medicine, and A Second Act, in a way that makes intensive care feel less like a place and more like a conversation about living, dying, and everything in between. More here.

The Limits of Our Language

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote,

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

Medicine proves this daily. We can name hundreds of anaesthetic agents, surgical manoeuvres, and pathological signs, but we can’t name the moment you care for a patient who shares your mother’s name—or the hollow ache when a trolley creaks away from a room it will never return to.
Without words, these moments live as private ghosts. They haunt, but they are never catalogued.

A Dictionary for the Gaps

This project is an act of linguistic repair.

The Dictionary of Blood and Silence builds a new vocabulary for medical moments that are too microscopic, too absurd, or too human for the standard lexicon.
Some words are stitched together from the Latin roots of anatomy and the breathy syllables of memory. Others are pure invention—sounds and shapes chosen because they feel right in the mouth. All are rooted in the lived worlds of healthcare workers: drawn from the narrative reflections of my years of writing. A new word will be added each week.

Five Moods, Infinite Moments

• Loss – the language of endings and absences.
• Touch – the sensory fingerprint of care.
• Life – the pulsing immediacy of action and breath.
• Joy – the rare, necessary bursts of absurdity or delight.
• Moments – the small, unforgettable interludes between crises.

These categories don’t box the words in—they simply offer a way to wander through the emotional architecture of medicine.

Why It Matters

In a BMJ column, I once wrote,

“Words matter. They are the only operating instruments we carry into every conversation.”

In medicine, words are scalpel and suture. They diagnose, they console, they bind people together in the aftermath. But they also shape how we see ourselves. Without language for an experience, it remains an unprocessed weight—something carried but never unpacked.

Naming these moments is not indulgence. It’s clinical housekeeping for the soul.

An Invitation

This is not a dictionary of pathology. It’s a shared language for those who have walked through the coded corridors of hospitals and carried home the scent, the silence, and the strange music of a shift.

Subscribe for free and unlock the whole lexicon. Each week, a fresh word arrives—half cure, half confession. And if you’ve got a word waiting on the tip of your tongue, you can set it free here too.

If medicine is about care, then naming the unnamable is part of that care—care for patients, care for colleagues, and care for the quiet places inside ourselves that deserve recognition.

The Dictionary of Blood and Silence exists to tell you: you’re not the only one who’s felt this. We’re all a little lost. And naming it is how we start finding our way.

A Thank You

Lexitide: The quiet gratitude for the tide of words you didn’t have until someone else found them first — thank you to John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, where longing gets its own latitude; to Douglas Adams’s Meaning of Liff, where ordinary place names are recycled into the extraordinary; and to Roger’s Profanisaurus, where vulgarity is elevated to a minor art form. Without their maps, I might never have gone looking for my own strange territories, or had the courage to name what medicine feels like when no ICD code will do.

Your Support Helps Others

Pagepulse: The heartbeat of a book as it travels from one pair of hands to another.

If you subscribe, you will be supporting Health Books International. They sends knowledge — bound, printed, and portable — to the places where it’s needed most. Manuals that make sense in the heat of a rural clinic. Guides that can be read by the light of a single bulb. Atlases that turn confusion into clarity.

In the wards and surgeries of the UK, we chase the immeasurable: the pause before bad news, the flicker of relief when treatment works. In the clinics and classrooms HBI serves, they chase the measurable too — the blood pressure reading, the right dose, the name of the parasite that’s been making a child sick.

By supporting them, this project lets the pulse of these words travel further, so that someone, somewhere, can hold both the science and the story in their hands.