The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1901-05-19
Medical Notes.

N~-~@-o~@~~o-~~o-~~-0-oo
| The popular idea Of medical signs AMI
! words IS that they are used to deceive
! and myStify the people, or to give an
! assumption Of knowledge, but this is a
| IallaCy In all arts and sciences tech
! meal words are the shorthand Of
! language, a whole sentence in one word
! 1t is much easier, for example. ~ say
! tonsilitis than inflammation Of the ton
! sis, which is what the word means, all
| medical words ending in tits meaning in
! E&mmation of the organ to which The
termination is added.
! Medical terms seem strange to tie
| I;tlty because they are not familiar with
| them and popular or often local names
! take their place, thus ca sing Goa
fusion and unin eligibility even among
| the profession who make concessions 10
the public, ignoraut Of things scientific
and use eolloquldi tpil.s aEI EXPRESSIONS
| that they may be inteliigli;c to the laty
Even common nam S may nave two or
more meanings varying with the persons
! using them. When a doctor tells q
farmer to take a teaspoonful of nitro
he means sweet spirits of nttre, OF in
technical words spirits etheris troi
| spirit of nitrous ether, but the farmer
| might think that he meant satpetre
also known to him as nitre, 4 very good
| thing to cure hogs meat but not good
1
Even common lanes are used with a
very vague idea of their meaning
When one speaks of cancer, for ex-
ample, he has no scientific or definite
reason for so doing and may call that
cancer which phyS,Gan would call
simple, chronic, liberation and not q
true and most malignant cancer Graf
stress is often made about the claws Of
a cancer as if il was a living thing OF
evil, fastening upon and burroWing into
the tissues of the body and draining
away the life-blood like a vampire In
fact, cancer is not alone in this role at
tributed to it by the Iaity for they be.
lieve that many, If no. ell diseases, ara
entities, having a deprayed appetite fof
preying upon humanity.
Cancer is an amusing example of the
See-Saw of Technology and knowledge.
A cancer does somewhat resemble n
crab because of the arrangement of the
glands which it attacks, and from this
resemblance it took it's name, the an
cient physicians writing only in Latin,
naturally using Latin names which haVe
clung to the language, although the
original meaning has been obscu.ed
while advances in research have dis
proved the fitness of the term which
may have become contradictory to fact
and misleading in application Carci-
mona, another term for cancer, IS simply
q change CT words without a change of
meaning for this is derived from the
Greek, karllinos, meaning a crab and By
q strange confusion a pair OF tongues
used for torture.
Cancer is not the only medical term
that suggests the preying Of an animal
upon man. Lupus, from the Latin,
meaning wolf, is so named because Il
gnaws the flesh, suggesting a wolf gnaw-
ing a bone. Gangrene, from the Greek
gangraina, literally means an eating
away.
Deathe, too, enters into the medical
nomenclature, as in necrosi~, from the
Greek nekros, death, a roo that appears
in metropolis. a city of the dead. Spha-
celus, from the Greek sphakelos, is to
kill, but slough in is derivation does
not imply DEATH although it is really
dead tissue, the word being from the
same root as slip, old German stu,
husk or covering?
Few if any technical terms are de-
scriptlve of a disease, but are often
merely terms relating to some symptom,
this word Itself being from the Greek
sun, with, and pipto, to befall, anything
that befalls one. Most common of thess
words is consumption, a much-abused
word, often wrongly applied even by
physicians Of a generation agp. The
word IS from the Latin cum with or
together, and sumo, to take, meaning a
consumption of the bodily tissues The
Romans, however. sometimes used the
Greek word phthsis, from phthio. to
waste, the two words thus being synon-
ymous. Tabes an alternative word
sometimes used, IS from the Latin taboo,
also meaning to waste away
The use of a pathological character m
place of a symptom does not explain TIE
disease any more lucidly. Tubercle,
from the Latin tuberculum, is a double
diminutive of tuber, a swelling a well
known term in botany A potato Is a
well known tuber. and to respect the
constituencies people who fear to eat to-
matoes because they believe that they
make cancer, should deprive themselves
Of potatoes for fear that the tubar5