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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25710 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Do we need the physicians to know the Latin for every small part of the body?

Yes, physicians need to know what parts of the body are called. That these terms are usually Latin has no bearing on that.

More or less, yes. Despite my position above that I don't think of there being much of a crisis of competence in medicine, that's precisely because there are standards that everyone has to meet. Some professions are basically fake in terms of actual technical knowledge and people can get by with a combination of improvisation and charisma; my impression is that people in these jobs sometimes mistakenly believe that all jobs work that way, and it just ain't so. Things like medicine and engineering have irreducible complexity, where you actually have to know each part of it and be able to use that understanding in practice. Physicians require more actual knowledge than marketing executives.

We need physicians to know the proper technical term for each small part of the body so they can talk to other physicians about it quickly and precisely. "Fracture of the left thumb" is not acceptable medical writing because the orthopaedic surgeon who reads it now has to find the X-ray image to know which bone in the thumb is fractured.

You can argue that Latinate technical terms make medicine harder to learn than strictly necessary, but the alternative of using technical terms that sound like ordinary words is worse (I've taught physics, I have the scars). In any case, my experience of dealing with doctors is that the technical terms named after obscure 19th century surgeons are more confusing that the Latinate ones.

I kind of want to see Ander-Saxon for medicine.

This is liefsome, but how would we win over the leeches to eft learn all their leechcraft anew?

The latin is the proxy for competence. If the doctor can't keep up with their research and papers to know their specialized lingo then they're unlikely to understand the workings of their trade. When you're in a select high context community, language is the filter to weed out imposters.

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