The starting-point of this study is our need for satisfactory explanations when we suffer from illness. Often, justly or not, we identify an individual or a group as disease carriers. This phenomenon can be regarded as an act of projection, and in Scandinavian ethnomedicine it shows itself in the terminology when a disease is named after an ethnic group. The present study, which shows just a few examples of this kind of linguistic projection, deals mainly with the words fransos ('Frenchman') and finnskott ('Lapp shot'), but words such as utländska elden ('the foreign fire') and tyskeldsår ('sore from German fire') are also mentioned.