It’s that time of year again, time for a check-up. I’m generally a healthy individual but with the last bout of influenza I faced, I’ve felt drained. I upped my annual check-up to make sure that it was just the flu and nothing else. It isn’t, I just need more vitamin B.
This was my first visit to this doctor. Most doctors have a small get to know you session littered throughout the medical history. The big question that always comes up, “So, what do you do?” and when I tell them I’m back in school, they always ask, “Going back for what?” I stated my lofty career choice of Latin teacher and the doctor smiled. “I wished they’d offered that in high school. I’ve always known I was going into the medical field. It would have been so useful.”
Latin, the language of medicine. No doctor can do without some knowledge in Latin. Probably its first and primary function is in anatomical nomenclature, followed by clinical and pharmaceutical terminology.
Ecclampsia: Convulsions
Musculus latissimus dorsi - The widest muscle of the back
Partes aequales (P. AE.) - Equal parts
These are just a few examples.
Henrik R Wulff, MD makes a case in his article “The Language of Medicine” in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine for creating a discipline called medical linguistics. He goes into the history of medicine and the languages used. Latin as the medical language really didn’t appear until after the Middle Ages, it was mostly Greek before that. 1853 was the last known use of just Latin in medicine. As time progressed each country kind of used their own language, but found it hard to communicate with other medical practitioners. So they decided to use Latin to kind of uniform the medical language. They still add to the vocabulary all the time adding French, German, and English to its vocabulary.
There are some people who think Latin will disappear from medicine. Some hospitals may not take prescriptions with Latin abbreviations on them. It’s also no longer a prerequisite in becoming a medical practitioner.
Latin has itself deeply imbedded in medical terminology. I don’t believe that it will be completely weeded out. It’s the roots to most of the words and the names of others. Even if it’s not required to learn Latin to become a doctor, it’s still learned anyways through medical texts at the very least.
Latin is still a thriving language in the medical world for the time being. It’s a kind of universal language for them. I’ve spoken with many people who deal with the scientific and medical world who do believe that even a year in Latin just learning vocabulary would have been a great deal of help to them. I’d advocate bringing in a “scientific” or “medical” Latin course for students going into these fields.
I’m glad to see that Latin is still pretty healthy here.
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