Ther e's an unexpected poetry to be found in many etymologies. Take the word gubernaculum, which describes the cord that guides the descent of the gonads in a developing foetus. It's a technical term, yet its literal meaning is simply "the helmsman," from the Latin gubernator: one who carefully steers. Medicine, which boasts a linguistic tradition unbroken since the 4th century BC, is full of such riches: dauntingly clinical words whose literal sense recalls a time when the exploration of the body had more in common with literature or philosophy than with modern science. Epilepsy, for instance, is a serious and extensively researched condition, yet what the word itself tells us, almost unchanged from the 2,000-year-old Greek epilepsia, is that its sufferers are "overwhelmed by surprise." Diabetes, similarly, is simply the ancient word for a siphon, coined when the Greek physician Aretaeus observed that urine seems to flow constantly from sufferers. He also named one of its types mellitus, the ancient word for honey's sweetness, as people with diabetes mellitus have sweet-smelling urine.
These words come to us from a time when the human body was assumed to be the natural measure of the world and when, in turn, it was assumed that the body was to be explained by analogy with nature. Modern medical language is, in its own way, a microcosm of our times: of our ambition to know nature objectively and to disembody our descriptions of both the world and ourselves. Our diseases—Aids, Sars—are acronyms; we try to see even our own minds objectively, turning to the analogy of machinery to pin down our thoughts: data, hard-wired, module, processor. Etymology is little taught in our medical schools; certain kinds of truth have no time for history.
