- Jeff Aronson, clinical pharmacologist
- Oxford
Some drugs yield more than one benefit. For instance, β blockers have antihypertensive, antianginal, and antiarrhythmic effects. They also have more than one adverse effect. So we can talk about their benefits and harms. It's all to do with how you count.
The Danish philologist Otto Jespersen expounded the concept of count and non-count nouns in an unpublished lecture to the Copenhagen Academy of Sciences in 1911. As he explained in The Philosophy of Grammar (1924), you can form plurals if you can collect two things alike. For example, two bananas (two of the same thing). Or two fruits, an apple and an orange (two of the same kind). But we have no plural word for a journal plus a stethoscope, except to call them …
Sign in
Article access
Article access for 1 day
Purchase this article for £20 $30 €32*
The PDF version can be downloaded as your personal record







CiteULike
Connotea
Del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Mendeley
Reddit
Technorati
Twitter
Stumbleupon
Rapid responses
Latest Responses
Re: Ventilator associated pneumonia
Published 30 May 2012
Re: Restless legs syndrome
Published 30 May 2012
Author's reply
Published 30 May 2012
Re: Full access to trial data holds many benefits and a few pitfalls, conference hears
Published 30 May 2012
Restless Legs Syndrome: Fact or Fiction
Published 30 May 2012
Most responses
Venous thrombosis in users of non-oral hormonal contraception: follow-up study, Denmark 2001-10 (12 responses)
Published 10 May 2012 - 23:32
The psychiatric oligarchs who medicalise normality (9 responses)
Published 2 May 2012 - 15:42
Are doctors justified in taking industrial action in defence of their pensions? No (8 responses)
Published 8 May 2012 - 12:21
Are doctors justified in taking industrial action in defence of their pensions? Yes (8 responses)
Published 8 May 2012 - 12:21
The hardest thing: admitting error (7 responses)
Published 2 May 2012 - 12:27