Physician - physicist

Don't confuse the two labels for professional occupations physician and physicist. Although they share much of their pronunciation (physician is stressed on the second syllable, 'fizz-ISH-en', IPA: /fɪx ˈɪʃ ^ən/, while physicist is stressed on the first syllable, 'FIZZ-iss-ist, IPA: /ɪ/) and a common root (in the Greek τὰ φυσικά (ta phusika), '[the] natural things' according to OED; or as wikipedia has it φυσική (phusike) ἐπιστήμη (epistḗmē) 'the knowledge of nature'. This gave rise to two very different academic subjects.

• Since the fourteenth century, physic (in the apparently singular form, pronounced 'FIZZ-ik', /ˈfɪz ɪk/) has been used as a term for medicine and related ideas, such as 'a remedy' or particular medicine; the medical profession or doctors; or "The science of the human body, its diseases, and their treatment; medical science. Now arch[aic]" ) OED 2006. Those who pursue a career "in the medical profession" are now called physicians, mostly in American English: in Britain, where 'physician' is not in general use, the usual name is GP, or 'General Practitioner'. A physician, according to Martin & McFerran (2014) is "a registered medical practitioner who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of disease by other than surgical means."

The convention in Britain is that a surgeon - usually more highly trained and described as a 'specialist'- is addressed as Mr or Mrs, Miss or Ms, while a GP (or other physician) is called Dr.

• Since 1715, the name of the branch of natural science that deals with energy and non-living matter (and whose "subject matter includes mechanics, heat, light and other radiation, sound, electricity, magnetism, gravity, the structure of atoms, the nature of subatomic particles, and the fundamental laws of the material universe. Also: the physical properties and phenomena of a thing" (OED, 2006) has been the apparently plural form physics, pronounced 'FIZZ-iks', /ˈfɪz ɪks/. Those who study these things are physicists, a name first given them by William Whewell in 1840, when he wrote, in The philosophy of the inductive sciences, "We might perhaps still use physician as the equivalent of the French physicien ... but probably it would be better to coin a new word. Thus we may say that..the Physicist proceeds upon the ideas of force, matter, and the properties of matter."