Radiology in French

Se rehausser is to enhance after contrast, and the small se in front of the verb is doing a job English leaves to silence. French has one regular way of saying that something happens to a subject without naming who did it: hang the reflexive pronoun on the verb. This page is built out of that move. La lésion focale se distingue du tissu voisin, le protocole d’examen se choisit avant l’arrivée du patient, le geste interventionnel se fait sous guidage par l’image, l’exposition aux rayons se justifie par la question posée — four verbs that take an object everywhere else, each turned inward by two letters. English makes the same turn and marks it with nothing: it uses the transitive verb with no object at all and leaves the reader to work it out, which is how « the door opens » and « the book sells well » come to be ordinary sentences. Radiology took that habit one step further and produced « the lesion enhances », which reads as a mistake to anybody outside the specialty. Where French shows the change of voice, English hides it and expects you to know.