Medical Terms

Introduction

To anyone with but a slight acquaintance with Latin and Greek, it is clear that those languages dominate overwhelmingly the vocabulary of the medical and related arts of the Western World.

There is a historical explanation for this. For the West, at least, the Greeks were the pioneers in medicine, just as they were in almost all the other genres of literature and science. They were militarily conquered by the Romans, who were in turn culturally conquered by Greece (“Captive Greece took captive the fierce victors” admits Horace, the poet laureate and literary critic of Rome’s Augustan Age.) Rome then conquered Western Europe military and culturally, bringing with it its own Latin Language and the Greek vocabulary that it itself had borrowed.

Medical terminology knowledge through the centuries in the Western World continued to expand tremendously, and new terms for diseases and treatments unknown to the Greeks and Romans were required. Greek and Latin elements continued to provide the tools for the new terms – but there was no longer one centralizing force, no Rome recognized as ruler. Just as the Latin language evolved in many ways into Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, etc. so the medical vocabulary for new medical discoveries evolved in different ways in the different countries. Greek and Latin terms continued to be used, but different ones in the different countries for the same disease and/or procedure. The result was a bewildering mass of hundreds of thousands of medical terms.

The 20th century has seen action taken to reduce, improve and systematize nomenclature through international commissions. For example, in Anatomy alone what had been 50,000 have been reduced to 5,000 “nomina anatomica.” Despite the fact there is still a huge mass of medical terms, as can be seen in any medical dictionary, an understanding of the key Greek and Latin components, which are constantly repeated in various arrangements, makes the understanding of the terms themselves much easier. For example, an ability to differentiate between “cephalalgia” (head-ache) and “encephalitis” (brain-inflammation), when the former is mentioned by the doctor, might enable the patient to avoid going into a quite unnecessary cardiac arrest!

Nevertheless, there are still some areas of duplication to be found where Greek and Latin etymological equivalents exist side by side: e.g. hypodermic/subcutaneous, ophthalmic/ocular, encephalic/cerebral, nephric/renal. The conservative tendencies of tradition die hard! However, as a general rule, in Descriptive Anatomy Latin terms are more common, while in Pathology and Operative Procedures Greek terms are more common.

Clinic Painter, Physician Treating a Patient, Red-figure Attic aryballos, ca. 480–470 B.C.E. The Louvre Museum, Paris © Wikimedia Commons