1. MEDICAL TERMINOLOGY: ARE YOU BEING WELL-TAUGHT?

(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)

                Let's do a little test.  How does the course you're taking teach you to translate the word cephalitis?  What about endocephalic?

                For convenience, from here on in let's divide all words under discussion into their meaningful parts (as I am sure you are taught to do by whatever textbook you are currently using), as cephal-it-is and endo-cephal-ic.

                I'm betting that you have learned to say "inside the head" (which is exactly what I would teach you) for endo-cephal-ic.  But you might have been taught (only if you have been very poorly taught) to generate "head-inflammation" (with or without the hyphen), or (better) "inflammation of the head" for cephal-it-is.  In this post, I would like to show you why even this translation is not really good enough in the real world of Medical Terminology.

                Let's begin by assuming for the sake of argument that your translations of both our words are "good enough" as they stand.   How then would you translate a new word made by joining them?  That is, how would you translate endo-cephal-it-is?  Would you settle for "inside-head-inflammation?"  Probably not!  How about "inflammation inside the head?"  Or would you go out on a limb and try "inflammation OF inside the head?"  If you have been fairly well taught then you know to reject this third option as not English, and therefore wrong; and so you might try to "expand" your ungrammatical translation to the perfectly grammatical "inflammation of THE inside OF the head."

                Unfortunately, all these interpretations are just plain wrong.  The reason is that -itis, when it is joined to a combining form, does NOT mean "inflammation," which is what you've probably been told it means.  In fact, a far more accurate translation for any word of the type x-itis (where "x" stands for any combining form or "root") is "THE inflammation OF X."

                So far so good.  For the word cephal-itis, this means is that I would insist that you write

"THE inflammation of the head" where you would probably have written "inflammation of the head."  Surely, a simple "the" can't make any useful difference?  But let's apply our formula to the more problematic word endo-cephal-itis and see what happens then.

                Our first attempt should generate something like "THE inflammation OF inside the head--" which doesn't get us much further, since we've already seen the grammatical problem here.  Therefore, we might try the "grammatical expansion" mentioned above, resulting in "the inflammation of THE inside OF the head."  In addition to being perfectly good English, this phrase names a perfectly plausible medical condition.  So why in the world, if you were my student and submitted this last answer on a test, would I mark you wrong?

                One substitution should help clarify things.  As you know (from whatever version of Medical Terminology you are studying), the prefix en- means the same thing as our endo-; therefore (by a simple switch), the word en-cephal-it-is means exactly the same thing as our word endo-cephal-it-is!

                If you don't immediately see the problem here, complain to your teacher!  But I'll assume that you have been taught, rightly, that the combining form en-cephal- always means "brain."

                Still stumped?  To restate the issue, the two words mean the same thing because the only difference between them is between two synonymous word-parts; because those parts are synonyms there can be no difference in the meaning of the wholes they find themselves in.  If your teacher is a classicist (a specialist in Latin and Greek) rather than a medical specialist, you should have been told in passing that the reason en-cephal- means "brain" is that the ancient Greeks, having no idea what the "inside-the-head" stuff was for (beyond noting that its spillage augured poorly for the head's owner), simply gave that very descripive name to that somewhat wierd spongy body part!

                And here is the solution of our problem, as non-medics trying to come up with a truly accurate translation for the unfamiliar (frankly made-up!) word endo-cephal-it-is:  it cannot be referring to "THE inside OF the head," because that is not what "the brain" is.  The generalization that a student using The Anatomy of  Medical Terminology takes away from this is that a prepositional prefix like endo- (or en-) cannot itself name a body part like "THE inside OF" something; rather, it will always denote a LOCATION.  To put this one last way, the brain (whatever you call it!), is LOCATED inside the head; but it cannot be said to be "THE INSIDE OF the head!"

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