This paper aims to analyse native speakers’ usage of abstract nouns in medical English, which will contribute to the linguistic characterisation of the discourse of medical science. More precisely, this research study intends to explore native speakers’ prototypical lexico-grammatical patterns around abstract nouns. This analysis is based entirely on corpus evidence, since all collocational patterns discussed have been extracted from the Health Science Corpus (HSC), which consists of a 4 million word collection of health science (i.e. medicine, biomedicine, biology and biochemistry) texts, specifically compiled for the current research study. The exploration of the collocational behaviour of abstract nouns in medical English will serve as a benchmark against which to measure non-native speakers’ production.