A physician is a medical doctor, usually one who treats illness with medicine rather than surgery. The word sounds formal: in the US you see it all the time on clinic websites and in medicine leaflets, while in Britain people say doctor or GP, a general practitioner. A scientist who studies physics is a physicist.
physician: will you get the meaning right?
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a family/hospital + physician (US); see/consult + a physician; doctor / GP (UK, everyday); a physicist (science, not medicine)
- If the pain gets worse, you should see your physician as soon as possible.
- My aunt worked as a hospital physician in Boston for more than twenty years.
What changed
First versionMy brother is a physician: he works in a research lab and studies black holes.
RevisionMy brother is a physicist: he works in a research lab and studies black holes.
Physician and physicist start the same way, and since physics gives us physicist, it's easy to assume physician belongs to physics too. But a physician treats people, and the person who studies black holes is a physicist.
A surgeon operates, and in the narrow sense a physician is the opposite: a doctor who treats people without operations. The neutral word for any situation is doctor: I need to see a doctor. A phrase like Ask your physician sounds like a line from an American medicine leaflet.
Your turn
Albert Einstein is probably the most famous ___ of the twentieth century.
Show the answer
physicist — Einstein was a scientist, the author of the theory of relativity, so he was a physicist. A physician is a doctor, and Einstein didn't treat patients.
Write about a doctor you go to. Say what kind of doctor they are and what you see them for.
My family physician is a general practitioner, and I see her once a year for a check-up and blood tests.
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