I first heard the term when I was a student. 'Client-centred therapy' was a fashionable US approach to psychotherapy and even then, when my bulldust receptors were still primitive, I found the word annoying.
'Client' was used sparingly in Australia in a medical context until the incipient managerialism of the 1980s allowed it to creep into more common use. From the outset, its adoption has been largely divided along professional lines: from surgeons and physicians — who never use it; to psychiatrists and nurses — who sometimes use it; to allied health practitioners — who favour it.
I was once, alas, fortunate enough to be invited to a 'workshop' to help write my hospital's mission statement. In this medical Tower of Babel, the doctors talked about their patients, the managers counted their clients and the community representatives defended themselves as consumers.
Promoters of the terms 'client' and 'consumer' want to change the way the sick person is considered by the health system. And how could this not be a good thing? The consumer movement, beginning in the 1970s, forced medical institutions and professions to take stock of the way they dealt with human beings.
But it came at a cost: if you call sick people 'clients' you risk turning healing into a commodity to be purchased (or rationed). Customers buy 'things' and so doctors compete to sell them: if you employ the words of the marketplace, you set the tone for the behaviour of the stallholders.
If medicine is constructed principally as a business activity, then the ethics of the healing hand that have driven the profession for millennia may be replaced by the workings of the invisible hand of Dr Smith.
The word 'patient' comes from the Latin patiens: 'one who suffers or endures'. If you have ever been one, then you get it. 'Client' on the other hand, is derived from cliens — a 'follower' or 'retainer' and was originally used in ancient Rome to describe the relationship between a plebeian and a noble.
I am intrigued that those seeking to change the perceived power balance between doctors and the people they treat, should abandon a term which describes the state of being sick, in favour of one that, from an etymological basis at least, actually highlights the inequality.
And what of the egregious term 'customer'? Although its origins are Middle English, a person of my vintage may recall the 1960s television program