The Words of Medicine: Sources, Meanings, and Delights (review)

Robert Fortuine. The Words of Medicine: Sources, Meanings, and Delights. Springfield, Illinois, Charles C. Thomas, 2001. xvi, 424 pp. $84.95 (cloth), $59.95 (paper).

One of the corollaries to knowing where you were when Oswald assassinated JFK or when the planes slammed into the World Trade Center towers is occasionally remembering what you were wearing or with whom you were talking, eating, being—or what book you were reading. These are cognitively and emotionally charged events and become permanent fixtures in anyone’s memory palace. I was reading chapter 8 (“The Imagery of Medicine”) of The Words of Medicine learning about hair cells when I and my fellow citizens awaiting jury duty suddenly realized that the newspapers, the books, the novels—what we were reading—had faded to so much ephemera, at least for 11 September 2001, and many days thereafter.

I am happy to say that the remainder of the book read uneventfully and was well worth the memories. It is a book on the grand etymological scale—not as thrillingly discursive as Joseph Shipley’s The Origins of English Words (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), but then very few books are. Nor is it the lexicographic marvel that Roland Brown’s Composition of Scientific Words (Baltimore, published by author, printed by G. W. King,1954) is, but it is more medically useful and accessible than the latter. The book—all 375 pages, 26 chapters, 33 tables, and 40 excellent pages of index—is massive, orderly, and comprehensive. The stated goals of the author—a family physician, educator, and administrator at the University of Alaska—are to increase awareness of precise meanings of medical words with aids to their correct usage. Given the steady effluvium of books on medical terminology and usage and history, this volume certainly sets a new standard for the stream of such monographs.

Its orderly approach begins with a firm grounding in the Greek and Latin that comprise so much of our medical vocabulary. Although it does not pretend to be “medical classics for dummies,” the book is very effective and clear. It will be especially helpful for those without these two languages that are the cornerstones of our medspeak and medwrite. After this short course with very useful tables (an excellent feature of the entire book), Fortuine moves on to chapters about words referring to animals (“parrot beak syndrome”), “This Green Earth,” “Home and Hearth” (“mallet finger”), “Medical Words of Yesteryear” (“putrid fever”), “The French Connection” (“torsade de pointes”), until the final chapters, which deal with modern medical terminology, from the parlance of HMOs to the confusing alphabet soup of chemotherapy protocols to the deplorable state of new drug names.

The merits of this book are many: it is exhaustingly exhaustive (the author’s penchant for multilevel organization betrays a man who probably outlines his “to do” lists to seven levels). Fortuine often explains compact phrases quite lucidly (e.g., forme fruste, or words like anlage). He lards the text with interesting explications and asides, such as Volkmann’s stature as a poet, or the relation of ansa to amphora. Too, he occasionally captures well the precise original meaning of a word and how it has been preserved. “Therapy” comes to mind. As Fortuine reminds us, it not only means to cure or treat but to care (undermining the efforts of some modern-day neologists interested in redefining the ethics of care vis-à-vis therapy). Indeed, Patroclus was the therapon to Achilles; in other words, he was his attendant (in the magnificent sense Simone Weil means when she uses the word “attention” in her notebooks when discussing compassion)—he cared (therapeuo) for Achilles. The tables, especially ones like 24-5 (“Some acronyms describing cardiovascular trials”), are themselves worth the price of the book.

In the quibbles and errors department: for an author writing about words, especially Latin and...