Читать книгу Facts and fancies for the curious from the harvest-fields of literature - Charles C. Bombaugh - Страница 76

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The “big words” of science are often necessary and useful, expressing what cannot be made clear to the student in any other way, but they are sometimes mere verbiage and mean no more than their common equivalents. It goes without saying that in this latter case the true scholar uses the short, plain word. He who writes in six-syllabled words for the mere pleasure of astounding the multitude is not apt to have very much solid thought to express. Some good advice on this subject, which is worthy the serious attention of other scientific men than students of medicine, was given to the students of the Chicago Medical College by Dr. Edmund Andrews, in an introductory address, from which the following paragraphs are taken:

It is amusing and yet vexatious to see a worthy medical gentleman, whose ordinary conversation is in a simple and good style, suddenly swell up when he writes a medical article. He changes his whole dialect and fills his pages with a jangle of harsh technical terms, not one-third of which are necessary to express his meaning. He tries to be solemn and imposing. For instance, a physician recently devised a new instrument, and wrote it up for a medical journal under the title, “A New Apparatus for the Armamentarium of the Clinician,” by which heading he doubtless hopes to make the fame of his invention “go thundering down the ages,” as Guiteau said.

Another writer wanted to say that cancer is an unnatural growth of epithelium. He took a big breath and spouted the following: “Carcinoma arises from any subepithelial proliferation by which epithelial cells are isolated and made to grow abnormally.” Now, then, you know all about cancer.

A writer on insanity illuminates the subject as follows: “The prodromic delirium is a quasi-paranoiac psychosis in a degenerate subject. A psychosis of exhaustion being practically a condition of syncope.”

The following is an effort to say that certain microbes produce the poison of erysipelas: “The streptococcus erysipelatosus proliferating in the interspaces of the connective tissue is the etiologic factor in the secretion of the erysipelatous toxins.”

A large cancer of the liver was found at a postmortem examination and reported about as follows: “A colossal carcinomatous degeneration of the hepatic mechanism.”

Still, the man of big swelling words is not always up in the clouds. If called to a case of accident, he examines the injury, and may inform the family in quite a simple and dignified manner that their father was thrown sidewise from his carriage breaking his leg and putting his ankle out of joint, but if he writes out the case for his medical journal, he gets up straightway on his stilts and says, “The patient was projected transversely from his vehicle, fracturing the tibia and fibula and luxating the tibio-tarsal articulation.”

Your man of solemn speech is peculiar. He does not keep a set of instruments—not he—he has an armamentarium. His catheters never have a hole or an eye in them, but always a fenestrum. In gunshot injuries a bullet never makes a hole in his patient, but only a perforation. He does not disinfect his armamentarium by boiling, but by submerging it in water elevated to the temperature of ebullition. He never distinguishes one disease from another, but always differentiates or diagnosticates it. His patient’s mouth is an oral cavity. His jaw is a maxilla. His brain is a cerebrum, his hip-joint is a coxo-femoral articulation. If his eyelids are adherent, it is a case of ankylosymblepharon. If he discovers wrinkles on the skin, they are corrugations or else rugosities. He never sees any bleeding, but only hemorrhage or sanguineous effusion. He does not examine a limb by touch or by handling—he palpates or manipulates it. If he finds it hopelessly diseased he does not cut it off—that is undignified. He gets out his armamentarium and amputates it.