doctoring

1. 1
   noununcountable

   Treatment given by a doctor, or the work of practicing medicine and caring for the sick.

   Rural doctoring often means long drives to reach patients in remote towns.

   The strain of wartime doctoring left many physicians exhausted and short of supplies.

   Similarmedicine

   Note

   Medicine seen as work done for patients, and it pairs easily with judging words: good doctoring, rural doctoring. Rider Haggard's narrator in She knows "enough of doctoring" to see a man is dying. Edgar Rice Burroughs, in The Return of Tarzan (1913), stretches it to a lonely heart in need of tending. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology (1950) even counts separate treatments as doctorings.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of doctor.

   She has been doctoring patients in the same village for nearly four decades.

   Investigators accused the firm of doctoring its safety records before the inspection.

   Note

   One spelling carries every meaning of the verb, from tending patients to tampering with evidence. The object usually decides which is meant: doctoring the sick heals, while doctoring the books deceives. As a gerund it keeps the verb's grip on an object (doctoring the accounts took weeks). The noun for medical practice takes no object and can even be pluralized as doctorings.

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