Emergency medical services

The eleventh entry is a massagem cardíaca, and it is the line on this page most likely to be carried across word for word and land in the wrong room. A massagem is the ordinary Portuguese word for a massage, and « massage » in English belongs to muscles, oil and a couch; nothing in it suggests the heel of one hand driving a chest down again and again. English did once say « cardiac massage », and the older textbooks carry « closed-chest cardiac massage » for exactly this. That term has been retired, and what replaced it describes the movement instead of the intention: « chest compressions », shortened in speech to « compressions ». The awkward part is that the old phrase did not disappear. It stayed on, with one word in front of it, for what a surgeon does with a hand inside an opened chest: « open cardiac massage ». So an English sentence about cardiac massage now points at an operating theatre. The Portuguese is correct, ordinary and taught on any first-aid course; its literal English twin moves the scene indoors and puts a scalpel in it.