The STEAM Blog

Angie Chang
Edited by Emily Kraut

In our thoughts, hours spent with friends, and in front of you right now, is language. Somehow, humans have found not only one, but several thousand ways to communicate with just their bodies. Officially, there are 7,139 spoken languages and over 300 sign languages. Language has shaped itself into every nook and cranny of our lives—it’s everywhere, and adapts to different geographic regions, cultures, people, and situations.

Language is, of course, familiar with hospitals—places already popularized as being for intense and highly skilled work only a select few can do. Technical language adds to this mystery.

All while under the pressure of health’s importance, widespread influences have pressured healthcare language into various expressions, then united those as our needs changed. Tracing the path of medical language takes us through both the expanses of linguistics as well as a small area of the healthcare scene from where another adventure may start.

Origins

Many modern medical terms have Greek and Latin roots. The oldest writings are Egyptian, but many of these works were translated to Greek and Latin and then expanded upon as civilizations and the role of healthcare in society began to grow. Hippocrates, a Greek physician considered the “father of medicine,” wrote over seventy books on detailed medical observations and classifications that scholars would come to study for centuries. His help with establishing medicine as a professional, disciplined field separate from philosophy makes his life a turning point of human history—and all his work was done in Greek.

Latin and Greek remained influential throughout Europe’s history. Circa the 14th century, Europe entered the Renaissance, a cultural movement that marked its transition from medieval times to modernity. Many of the intellectual breakthroughs fostered by the Renaissance were medical. As the field of anatomy expanded alongside our changing world, Latin was used to describe it.

Evolution

As writings pass through time and space on the way from one scholar to another, origins lose influence and changes are inevitable. Interpretations already vary, but when words are translated from French to English to German and more languages, a confusing game of Telephone is created. This process of language change through the evolution of definitions is known as semantic shift. One example would be the meaning of “addiction” changing from dependence on a substance to compulsive behaviors including gambling or, in popular culture, something you’re really into.

Words can, and often do, keep their original definition but become unrecognizable. The word “cardiac,” meaning relating to the heart, came from ancient Greek “καρδία” (pronounced kardía, means “heart”). On its way to “cardiac,” the word also saw the forms Greek “καρδιακός” (kardiakós), Latin “cardiacus,” and Middle French “cardiaque.”

Some words not only get a completely new look, but also mix and match with others in ways ancient Greeks and Romans would never understand, showcasing how we use what we already have in new ways. What would a word consisting of parts meaning “throw,” “heart,” and “description” describe? It turns out that ballistocardiography, coined from the Greek words βάλλω (ballō, “throw”), καρδία (kardia, “heart”), and γραφία (graphia, “description”), is a method for representing body movements caused by the mechanical activity of the heart.

A Unified System

Standardization

Semantic shifts can lead to misunderstandings, which could put patients’ health at risk. To prevent this, having consistent meanings for words is helpful. Using the same words for the same things also simplifies data entry and retrieval, which in turn simplifies the jobs of computers and greatly increases efficiency.

Thus, several organizations have worked to create systems, such as SNOMED CT (an acronym for Systematized Medical Nomenclature for Medicine Clinical Terminology but also a brand name) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD). These organized collections of terms help humans and computers identify, study, discuss, and compare work.

Morphology

Currently, commonly accepted medical terms are often consistent in morphology. Morphology, in linguistics, is the study of the forms of words. Different morphemes, or units of language, such as prefixes, roots, and suffixes, create different words. Using the prefix “re-” instead of “dis-” gives “reintegrate” a completely different meaning from “disintegrate.”

Understanding this, we now know that by studying common prefixes and suffixes in medical terms, we can guess the meaning of words we’ve never seen before. A few examples are given below.

Prefix	Meaning	Example
bio-	life	biology
dys-	difficult, abnormal	dysautonomia
necr- or necro-	death	necrosis

Suffix	Meaning	Example
-ity	pertaining to	immunity
-pathy	disease	neuropathy
-phagia or -phagy	eating, swallowing	autophagy

Medical Language Now

From the need to accommodate the 21st century’s rapid innovations arises an argument against rigid systems and standards. New terminology is constantly being created to describe unprecedented changes—in just the past five years, the COVID-19 pandemic and the growth of artificial intelligence have transformed lives.

Change is inevitable, but we can adapt. This adaptation is possible precisely because of systems already in place. SNOMED CT started in 1965 as a collection of pathology terms, but developed to include more terms and later merged with another collection named Clinical Terms Version 3 (CTV3). Now, SNOMED CT is updated monthly.

What makes language so interesting is how it reflects the diversity and ever-changing nature of people themselves. It’s not surprising that it needs to be governed, just as people need to be governed. From the complexity of medical language, we can find that the general medical world is fascinatingly complex.

References

• Awaysheh, A., Wilcke, J., Elvinger, F., Rees, L., Fan, W., & Zimmerman, K. (2017). A review of medical terminology standards and structured reporting. Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation, 30(1), 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/1040638717738276
• Chiaravalloti, D. (2022, July 29). The origins of common medical terminology and acronyms. BoardVitals Blog. https://www.boardvitals.com/blog/origins-medical-terminology-acronyms/
• Gliklich, R. E., & Leavy, M. B. (n.d.). Table 3-1, Examples of vocabulary and terminology standards* – Tools and Technologies for Registry Interoperability, Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes: A User’s Guide, 3rd Edition, Addendum 2 – NCBI Bookshelf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK551886/table/ch3.tab1/
• Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. (2019, December 10). Terminology standards. HIMSS. https://www.himss.org/terminology-standards
• Hektoen International. (2024, July 18). Body language: The history of medical terminology – Hektoen International. Hektoen International – An online medical humanities journal. https://hekint.org/2023/01/17/body-language-the-history-of-medical-terminology/
• Pepper, O. H. P. (1949). Medical etymology : the history and derivation of medical terms for students of medicine, dentistry, and nursing.
• Vylomova, E., Murphy, S., & Haslam, N. (2019). Evaluation of semantic change of Harm-Related concepts in Psychology. In Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (pp. 29–34) [Conference-proceeding]. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/W19-4704.pdf
• Wulff, H. R. (2004). The language of medicine. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 97(4), 187–188. https://doi.org/10.1258/jrsm.97.4.187