The nervous system and neurology

Two words for a stroke stand in this list, and behind them is an older one that has left the clinic altogether. Der Schlaganfall is what patients and families say, der Insult is what a discharge letter says. Older German often said simply der Schlag, the blow that fells a person without warning, which is the same picture English keeps in « stroke ». In that short form the word now lives almost only in an idiom, and in the idiom nobody is ill. Mich trifft der Schlag! means that something has left you speechless: a bill, a piece of news, the state of a teenager’s room. Ich war wie vom Schlag getroffen says the same looking back, and it can carry shock or plain astonishment. So when a German says der Schlag in conversation, expect surprise rather than a diagnosis; the illness itself is ein Schlaganfall.