No, I'm fine. Not that kind of medical history. I'm talking about the history of medicine, and the history of medical terminology.
A couple of weeks ago I had my annual checkup. It mostly consisted of a blood draw and some lab work, to see if all my humors were properly balanced.
But I did have a couple of minor complaints and mentioned them to my Primary Care Physician. I've got a swelling on one hand where my ring was digging into the tendon as I split firewood. "Ah," he said. "It's a little hematoma."
I also had a persistent skin irritation in my ear. "Dermatitis," he said.
The secret to medical diagnosis is the same as J.K. Rowling's magic system: translate it into Latin and you're done.
Now this is just a little bit of daily life to chuckle over — but then I had a great historical insight. Now I understand why wealthy Romans of the Imperial era all hired Greek doctors. It wasn't so much that Greeks were better doctors. (Basically all doctors were useless until about a hundred years ago.)
No, the advantage the Greek doctors had was that they spoke Greek! The Latin-speaking Roman patient would not have been satisfied with hearing his swelling diagnosed as a hematoma or his skin irritation as dermatitis, because that's how he would have described the symptoms in the first place. Nobody wants a doctor who just repeats back what you say in the same words.
But a Greek doctor could have looked at his Roman patient's swollen tendon and said "Ah! Looks like αιμάτωμα!" Or checked out his irritated skin and sagely said "Yes, δερματίτιδα." And the patient would have happily gone home for some parrot tongues and a massage, or whatever, serene in the knowledge that his symptoms had a fancy foreign name.
That also explains why the ancient Egyptians had an even more formidable reputation as physicians. If your doctor's diagnosis is a bunch of eyes, bird heads, reeds, and dancing men, well, he must be a very good doctor indeed!
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