Nosocomephobia is defined as the excessive fear of hospitals.
, a physician and clinical professor at
New York University Medical Center
NYU Langone Health is an academic medical center located in New York City, New York, United States. The health system consists of NYU Grossman School of Medicine and NYU Long Island School of Medicine, both part of New York University (NYU), and m ...
says, "It's perfectly understandable why many people feel the way they do about a hospital stay," and continues, "You have control of your life ... up until you're admitted to a hospital."
Former U.S. President
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a representative and senator from California and was t ...
allegedly had an irrational fear of hospitals, even purportedly refusing to get a treatment for a blood clot in 1974, saying, "if I go into the hospital, I'll never come out alive."
Nosocomephobia comes from the
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
νοσοκομεῖον (''nosokomeion''), "hospital" and φόβος (''phobos''), "fear".
See also
*
Nosophobia
Nosophobia, also known as disease phobia or illness anxiety disorder, is the irrational fear of contracting a disease, a type of specific phobia. Primary fears of this kind are fear of contracting HIV infection (AIDS phobia or HIV serophobia), pul ...
*
List of phobias
The English suffixes -phobia, -phobic, -phobe (from Greek φόβος ''phobos'', "fear") occur in technical usage in psychiatry to construct words that describe irrational, abnormal, unwarranted, persistent, or disabling fear as a mental dis ...
References
Phobias
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