看病
kàn bìng · HSK 1
to visit a doctor
🩺 看 (look) + 病 (illness) = look at illness → see a doctor
看 means to look or watch; 病 means illness or disease. Together the compound literally reads as look-at-illness, covering both sides of the visit: a patient seeing the doctor and a doctor examining the patient.
看 — hand 手 over eye 目
看 is an associative compound showing a hand (手, simplified to 龹) shading an eye (目), depicting someone shielding their eyes to look into the distance. From this concrete gesture it broadened to mean 'to look,' 'to watch,' and later 'to read' or 'to consider.'
病 — sickness radical 疒 + 丙 (bǐng, phonetic)
病 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The radical 疒 depicts a person lying on a bed and signals illness or ailment. The component 丙 supplies the sound (bǐng → bìng). Originally 病 referred to a serious illness, contrasted with 疾 for a lighter ailment; today it broadly means 'sick' or 'disease.'