Medical “Pimping” Means Tough Quizzing of Students and Residents

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lena from Oceanside, California.

Hi, Lena.

Hi, Lena. How are you doing?

Good. Well, I have a question about a certain word.

I’m a physician, and I’ve been out of training for a while.

But I was meeting with a friend of mine who just graduated from medical school.

And a certain word came up that is very common among doctors,

Especially when they’re in school and in training.

And it’s an unusual use of the word, and so I was wondering,

How it came to be that way. And the word is to pimp, P-I-M-P. And it doesn’t have anything to do

With pandering or even the use of, you know, kind of cool. It means to quiz someone minutely,

Like usually by a superior position. So if you’re pimp, it means someone usually,

Your superiors asked you a lot of questions that usually get progressively harder

Until you finally can’t answer them.

And it’s usually in front of your peers.

So it seems like the goal is to basically humiliate you

And embarrass you in front of your peers.

And it’s sort of something that every doctor has gone through.

So you ask any doctor in the United States,

They’ll know exactly what that word means.

Interesting.

In that context.

And so how would you use it in a sentence?

I would say, like, the attending physician pimped the intern about liver failure until she cried,

Embarrassing herself in front of her fellow students.

Wow.

So it’s a word you kind of dread or dread having used about yourself, right?

Yes.

It doesn’t always mean to go to that extreme, but it often does.

But it definitely has a negative connotation.

At least there’s the quizzing component there from someone senior questioning someone junior about what they know.

Exactly.

That’s interesting stuff.

Well, let’s get the first thing out of the way, right, Martha?

This has nothing to do with pimp my ride or pimps and prostitutes.

It’s a different pimp altogether.

There is what I think to be the definitive article on this was published in 1989 in the Journal of American Medicine.

Frederick Brancati wrote an article about pimp and pipping,

In which he mentions that the pimp probably is directly related to German.

This pastime, this custom of quizzing the students or the learning physicians,

Comes to us from Germany, and it comes from that culture, that culture of medicine there.

And the word that he uses, which I have not been able to verify, is pumpfrasch,

Which basically means pimp questions.

And he suggests that pimp is related to the English pump.

So you might pump someone for information.

It’s kind of the language used in detective novels, right?

The detectives pumped the narc for information.

And so it’s pretty simple when you think about it in those terms.

It might just be a simple matter of a vowel.

As it left German and went into English, we heard the German poomp or whatever it was as pimp.

And then we call it pimp instead of pump.

That makes sense.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does.

We’ll link to this article on our website.

I think there’s a full version of it out there somewhere.

But he takes it back to as far as 1889.

And again, I’m not 100% sure if his sources and his etymologies and everything are correct.

There’s a lot of information here to verify.

You know how doctors are when they write for journals.

But if I ever get a chance, I’ll try to verify this stuff.

We’ll link to it at least as a good starting point.

I would not be surprised to find that this is it.

Okay, so it’s not an acronym like prying inquisitive medical persons.

It is not.

Some people will claim that the medical term PIMP is an acronym.

It is not an acronym at all and never has been.

So just be very clear about that.

Even though you guys are fond of acronyms, right?

Yeah, that makes sense.

Thanks, Lena.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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