Occupational medicine

An English reader who meets der Simulant thinks of a stand-in: the simulant used in a chemical-defence exercise, the fake blood on a film set, a material that behaves like the real thing without being it. German uses the word for a person. Ein Simulant is somebody who pretends to be ill, a malingerer, and in a doctor’s surgery simulieren means feigning symptoms. It is an accusation rather than a description, and it belongs in this list because occupational medicine spends so much of its effort on complaints nobody can see: a back worn down by die Zwangshaltung, hearing that fades too slowly for anyone to notice the day it went, a hand eczema that comes and goes with the job. Grammatically it is a weak noun — den Simulanten, dem Simulanten — and a woman is die Simulantin.