An official title on a door in the Stanford University Medical Center, noted as I was being wheeled (in the middle of the night) to a test on one of my recent stays at SUMC. No Chopin is involved in this position.
I knew about hospitalists. From NOAD:
noun hospitalist: a dedicated in-patient physician who works exclusively in a hospital.
But nocturnists are even more specialized. From Wikipedia:
A nocturnist is a hospital-based physician [a hospitalist] who only works overnight. Most nocturnists are trained in internal medicine or family medicine and have experience in hospital medicine. However, there are nocturnists trained in other specialties, such as pediatrics. The main role of a nocturnist is to admit patients into the hospital from an emergency department, and to care for previously admitted inpatients through the night.
I was sort of hoping that SUMC would be sending in the pianists, but alas no.
