The Origin of Medical Terms
The Origin of Medical Terms, Second Edition
By Henry Alan Skinner
Published by Hafner, 1970
This is a 7" by 10" clothbound book running to 438 pages, printed two columns per page, plus an introduction. Entries for medical scientists are illustrated with small pen and ink drawings or etchings.
Etymological dictionaries are fascinating, and more fascinating if they focus on a subject of interest to you. Most etymological dictionaries provide longer discussions of fewer words than a regular dictionary, which makes it logical to create one focused on a specific vocabulary, like the vocabulary of medicine. This dictionary has about 4,000 words in it, a tenth of what you typically find in a smaller English dictionary. Typical entries are about two column inches in length but are sometimes a half a page long.
The drawback of this book is its age. At 36 years old, it's a bit dated, in more than one way. First, the vocabulary of medicine has greatly expanded and has also rendered some terms obsolete. Second, some ideas in historical linguistics have changed, which means that we now know that some of the etymological tracings in this book are probably wrong. (I can't tell you which ones, but I can tell you that the introduction states that Basque is a Semitic language, an idea that historical linguistics has thoroughly discarded by now.) If you use this book taking account of its age, however, it can be very useful and entertaining.
Here is a list of the first fifteen entries in the "L" sequence:
- LABIUM
- LABORATORY
- LABOUR
- LABRUM
- LABYRINTH
- LAC
- LACERTUS FIBROSUS
- LACRIMAL
- LACUNA
- LAENNEC
- LAEVULOSE
- LALLOUETTE
- LAMARCK
- LAMBDA
- LAMINA
The etymological discussions provided are kind of fun. Here's just one typical example:
RADIUM
Latin--a ray.
The discovery of a metallic element which emitted rays was announced in December 1898 in a paper communicated to the Académie des Sciences de Paris and signed by Pierre Curie, S. Curie, and G. Bemont, "Sur une nouvelle substance fortement radioactive, dans la pech blende." The substance was radium chloride. The action of radium on malignant tumours was first shown by Danysz in 1903.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
referencebooks) wrote,
