Depending on where you live — not to mention a whole host of other factors — it can take quite some time to schedule an appointment to see a doctor, or to receive treatment for some medical condition. The whole process can be pretty frustrating, and often your only choice is to just be patient. Which is ironic, because all you really want is to become a patient — but some medical practices declare that they’re “not taking new patients” no matter how patient you might be.
Being patient doesn’t mean the same thing as being a patient, but both uses of “patient” come from the same Latin word “patient,” which is also found in Middle French. “Patient” was adopted into English around the 1100s, and meant “tolerant.”
There are plenty of things you can tolerate, from irritating recitations of word origins to hardship, discomfort, and pain. If you’re suffering from an illness — particularly if you discover, to your dismay, that you’re living in the thirteenth century — you might have little choice but to tolerate it. To be, in a word, “patient.” And it was about that time that “patient,” which up to then had been an adjective, started to be used as a noun to mean someone under medical care. Or at least what passed for medical care at the time.
Chaucer used “patient” as a noun in the Canterbury Tales prolog: “He kepte his pacient a ful greet deel In houres by his magik natureel.” Which makes it sound like a doctor in 1385 might not, in fact, be all that different from a doctor in 2019 — they both “keep their patients for many hours” so they can practice their “natural magic” on them. That probably explains why the word “patient” has been waiting patiently for centuries but has never acquired any new or different meanings. It must be that natural magic.
