Nephrology

One entry on this list has left the ward and gone into everyday speech. Das geht mir an die Nieren says that something has got to you: a diagnosis, a hard conversation, a scene you keep seeing. The person affected stands in the dative, die Nachricht ging ihr an die Nieren, and the cause is the subject, so the sentence is built much as « it got to her » is. English files this kind of distress under the heart or the stomach; German reaches for the kidneys. The image is an old one: the Bible counts the kidneys among the seats of feeling, and where the King James Version says « reins » it means exactly that. The phrase is informal, so it belongs to a conversation at the bedside and never to the discharge letter, where the same organs appear as die Nierenwerte and die glomeruläre Filtrationsrate. These pages explain words and give no medical advice.