In biomedical documents, there is ample evidence for complex morphological structures in specialized terms. While inflection is relatively easy to deal with, productive morphological processes such as derivation and single-word composition constitute a major challenge. Considering the problem from an information retrieval perspective, we split morphologically complex words into biomedically significant, morpheme-like subwords and match subwords the query terms and document terms are composed of. This way, morphologically motivated word form alterations can be eliminated from the retrieval procedure. Based on a series of retrieval experiments, we have gathered evidence that subword-based indexing and retrieval – for the German biomedical sublanguage, at least – outperforms conventional string matching approaches.