Oncology

The sentence an oncology ward waits for is Der Tumor spricht auf die Therapie an, and its grammar is less obvious than it looks. Ansprechen on its own takes an accusative object and means to speak to somebody: Sie spricht den Arzt an. Add the preposition auf with an accusative and the verb loses its object and changes meaning entirely — it now says that something reacts to something, and its subject is the patient, the tumour or the disease. Because the verb is separable, the two halves end up far apart: spricht in second position, an at the end, and the auf phrase in between, so the reader has to hold the preposition until the particle arrives. The noun keeps both pieces together: das Ansprechen auf die Chemotherapie. These pages explain words and give no medical advice.