Just a quick post to wish anyone reading a happy holidays. Hope everyone who celebrates it had a good Christmas yesterday and hope that everyone who buys things is enjoying the Boxing Day sales today.
I got an interesting stocking-stuffer gift this year, a pocket medical dictionary from 1928. It's an interesting read! Lots of terms that are no longer in use or which have changed in use in the past century. There's a big focus on herbalism and infectious diseases, since Penicillin was only invented that very year and wasn't used clinically for over a decade afterwards. Heck, there's an entry for Penicillium, the fungus that produces Penicillin, but not the drug itself!
There are also a lot of subtly (or not-so-subtly) racist terms... not cool old docs, not cool.
Anyway, it's a fun distraction. Shows how far medicine has come in many respects, but also how much has remained the same. A lot of the terms used exclusively in medicine today are unchanged from a century ago, particularly the anatomical terms. I've got a physics background, so I'm used to learning about discoveries from centuries ago, but medicine we often think about as a more modern creation. My fancy old-school medical dictionary is a nice reminder that all we know has been developed over a very long period of time, a knowledge base built by a very large number of people.
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