カルテ

German Karte is the source form for カルテ, and Duden defines Karte as a card, postcard, menu, ticket, playing card, or map. Duden traces Karte through French carte and Latin charta to Greek chartes, a papyrus sheet. 精選版日本国語大辞典 gives a 1949 example from Mishima Yukio's Kamen no Kokuhaku with a school doctor writing in a カルテ. The borrowing belongs to modern medical Japanese. From the Meiji period, 1868-1912, Japanese medical education used many German terms because German university medicine was a model for anatomy, internal medicine, and hospital training. The related German Krankenkarte means patient card, but Japanese did not borrow the compound. カルテ settled beside other medical loans such as ガーゼ, レントゲン, アレルギー, and ギプス, but its meaning narrowed to the patient record used in a clinic or hospital. Today カルテ means a medical chart, including 電子カルテ in hospitals after the computerization of records. Modern Japanese also says 診療録 in legal or administrative language. It does not mean a restaurant menu, map, or ticket, although German Karte can mean all of those. English usually says medical chart or patient record; カルテを確認する means check the chart, not check the card.