At M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, we used to say, "When the going gets tough, the tough call Dr. Badie Alakech."

Badie is a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Damascus, and worked as a medical translator/interpreter at M.D. Anderson. Whenever we ran across a tough Arabic medical term, he was our indisputable resource.

Badie is now in his first semester of pathology residency in Lubbock, Texas. We can't reach him by phone, and he can’t always respond to his e-mail quickly enough for our purposes. I wrote to him yesterday, but have not received any response. I tried reaching other Syrian-educated physicians in the Houston area (including a Syrian-born Sudanese doctor), but had no luck.

I wish that you had posted both terms together. In both expressions, TASHREEH MARADHI stands for patho-anatomy. The puzzling part is 'AMM versus KHASS. When I saw your first posting, I assumed that the term ‘AMM was a precautionary modifier to guard against the common error of using the expression TASHREEH MARADHI for histopathology, as they did at Al-Ahli Hospital in Al-Khaleel, Palestine:

http://www.ahli.org/arabic/histopathology.htm

That is why I suggested the term “gross.”

With the second posting, everything changes. If 'AMM meant "gross," it would have been contrasted with NASJI ("histologic"), not KHASS.

As I see it, the terms KHASS and ‘AMM do not refer to medical specialties or scientific disciplines, but to specific courses at a particular medical school. Therefore, no medical or lexical knowledge can be of any use here. Your best resource would be your client. He or she attended the classes, and can best compare and contrast their content. If your agency is keeping the client incommunicado, then the next best thing is to ask someone who studied the same curriculum.

I don't know if these courses were taken at a Syrian medical school or not, but I will keep trying to get help from my Syrian friends. Until I get a sure answer, guessing is king.

My guess is that the course designated as AL-‘AMM consists of general principles, while AL-KHASS consists of cases of special interest in which the general principles would be put to practice.

With my luck, Badie will not answer my e-mail until I post this, and his answer will be entirely different. But until then, I can’t think of anything else.

Fuad