Let us see, then, if it be possible to take some of our common medical words and by applying to them the methods of Whitney and of Marsh follow them back to their early forms and significances, and then construct from them ideographs of the customs, habits and superstitions of the men who used them. Such a plan systematically carried out might furnish both a fitting and a novel introduction to the history of medicine. Coleridge, you know, said we might often derive more useful knowledge from the history of a word than from the history of a campaign.
Take, for instance, our word idiocy. The Greeks, especially the Athenians, were a race of politicians. Private citizens who cared little or naught for office were the idiotai, as distinguished from the public officials and office holders. It came about in time that men of such retiring habits and modest tastes were regarded as persons of degraded intellect and taste. And so the iviwrai were considered of inferior intellectual capacity. In other words, the idiot of those days was the man content with private life. How different from the present day when conditions seem so nearly reversed.
Our kindred word imbecile has also present reference to those of feeble, dwarfed or perverted intellect, and refers rather to mental than physical defects, though both must often be associated. But originally the lame and the deformed who were obliged to use artificial support, walked as it was said, in bacillum, upon a stick or crutch, and from this expression we derive our word imbecile.
Let us trace, for instance, again, the etymology of our word palate. The Latin palatum is the same as balatum, that is, the bleating part. The ancient shepherds of the region of the Campagna watched the sheep as they went bleating (balatans) over those hills, one of which subsequently became the Palatine.
Or take again our word mania. It is derived from unv the moon, meaning the moon-sickness, and corresponds to lunacy from luna. You see the ancient superstition concerning the influence of the moon abides in the name. This brings up again the old ideas concerning the metal silver which was sacred alike to Diana and the moon, and consequently feminine in sex and attributes. Hence comes the mediæval alchemistic term lunar caustic, and hence, too, comes its use in the treatment of epilepsy for which it was formerly much in use, since epilepsy was regarded as a form of mania caused by the evil influence of the moon.
By the way, this may also remind us of the peculiar views of the alchemists of the middle ages, who believed that the property of sex inhered in the metals. They believed, for example, that arsenic was masculine in sex, and so named it from arsen, male, and arsenikos, masculine. Medical, like comparative philology, is the more or less direct outcome of the earth's physical features as they have influenced the commingling of races and the conquest of nations.
Medicine seems a science of Aryan parentage; in the Sanscrit the literature of medicine is rich; it was cultivated by the Greeks, but it lost much of its original significance by virtue of Roman supremacy, as the Latin races took it over. Under the Arabians it flourished after a fashion. With the revival of Greek learning there was a restoration of much that had been lost, but the supremacy of the Church kept it within extremely narrow limits, though the clericals could not eliminate all the Arabian words which had crept into its terminology. Greek is to-day the language to which we turn for aid when it becomes necessary to invent new terms by which to indicate fresh discoveries or concepts.
The debt of medicine to our Aryan forefathers is great. Surgery was then a dignified branch of the science. Their autoplastic methods were conceived with great ingenuity and carried out with much, albeit with crude skill. The so-called Indian method of reconstructing a nose bears witness to their ability in plastic art. Their itinerant surgeons performed many capital operations; i. e., lithotomy and cœliotomy. There is good reason to believe that Hippocrates knew nothing of practical anatomy, whereas, long before him Susruta urged that all physician priests should dissect the human body in order that they might know its structure; and gave, moreover, directions for the selection of suitable subjects. The Sanscrit writers knew the properties of many plants and of at least five of the metals. Many Greek names of drugs are derived from the Sanscrit, or else they had a common Aryan origin. Thus the Greek equivalents for our words castor, musk, cardamon, chestnut, hemp, mace, pepper, sandal-wood, ginger, nerve, marrow, bone, heart, and head, are unmistakably of much older, i. e., Sanscrit or Aryan stock, several of them coming down in Romanized form, but almost unchanged—e. g., os, cor, moschus, cannabis, castorion.
Although many of the ancient Greeks visited India, it appears that but relatively few words have come to us from this ancient source.