看病
かんびょう · kanbyou · JLPT N2 · noun
nursing
🩺 看 (look after, care for) + 病 (illness) = caring for someone who is sick
看 means to look at or take care of, and 病 means illness. Together they describe looking after a sick person, which is what a nurse does.
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.'