But, unlike a foreign language, you come across medical terminology every day in magazines and newspapers with articles about new drugs, diets, new medical treatments and on television medical dramas. What follows is a mini-course in medical terminology. You will learn approximately 300 words. This may seem like a lot, but it is only a fraction of the words you would learn in a full academic course in the subject. However, the goal is not to learn a bunch of new words to impress your friends, but to learn the basics of what makes up medical terms so you can not only use and understand them yourself, but be able to recognize and learn new terms when you come across them in the future.
Many medical terms have interesting, even weird meanings or stories behind their evolution as words.
They are named after a 16 th century Italian anatomist, Gabriello Fallopio.