We attempt to show that some syntactic or lexical patterns are typical of medical language, as regards both term formation and phraseology. Using the statistics provided by the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2009), we outline some distinctions between general language and medical language, as well as a few differences between medical, legal and scientific English. We examine the use of the passive form, as well as syntactic structures in the noun phrase, focusing on multi-word expressions with multiple modifiers. Morphological and syntactic features of relational adjectives are also discussed, as well as some lexicogrammatical specificities of medical English (e.g. the combination of modal auxiliaries or modal adverbs with the passive form, the relatively rare use of phrasal verbs). We finally study the case of some commonly used lexical items that have acquired a specialized meaning in some colligations that are typical of medical English. The description of those lexical and syntactic peculiarities allows us to point out some of the most salient distinctions between the type of English found in medical research articles and that of other academic subgenres.