Janet in Montgomery, Alabama, reports that a day after she had surgery on her hand, the wound burst open, and a doctor noted that her wound dehisced. She’s used to hearing dehisce used in botany to mean the splitting of a plant structure to release its contents. Dehisce derives from a Latin term that means “to gape” or “to yawn.” There are lots of similarly poetic medical terms. Tibia, Latin for “flute,” was applied to the similarly straight leg bone. The Latin term fulgur, which means “lightning,” produced fulguration or “cautery,” used to excise a tumor. Plethora, meaning “a multitude of things,” was originally a medical term referring to “an excess of blood or other bodily fluids.” Your biceps muscle, which has two parts, takes its name from Latin for “two-headed,” and the word muscle itself comes from Latin musculus, literally “little mouse,” a reference to a muscle’s resemblance to a little rodent twitching beneath the skin. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Dehisce: When a Wound or Seed Pod Bursts Open”
Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Janet Hutto. Hi, Janet. Where are you calling from?
Montgomery, Alabama. What’s on your mind, Janet? It’s kind of a funny question. This past spring, I had to have a small surgery on my hand because there was a cyst growing there.
And they told me to go home and wait two weeks, come back, they’ll take out the stitches, which I did and then the doctor sent me home for regular activities and within a day the wound burst open and I had a doctor friend of mine look at it and he said your wound dehist.
And I went it what he said dehist so I went home and looked that up in the dictionary.
And dehist is a botanical term that refers to a seed pod bursting open or a flower opening.
So my question is, that seems awfully poetic for a medical description.
And yeah, so I wondered how many borrowed terms of similar poetic character are there in the sciences borrowed from another science? Do y’all know?
Well, I just have to say, Janet, I think the world could do with a few more poet doctors. I don’t mind poetry in my medicine.
I hear you.
Oh, and Janet, you’re talking about one of my favorite topics in the world. Just the fact that we are metaphor-making animals. I mean, when you talk about scientific terms, I’m thinking about, you know, the tibia in your leg, that straight bone comes from the Latin word for flute.
And I’ll never forget the time that I was listening to a doctor talk, and he was talking about fulguration. Do you know this term, fulguration?
No.
Well, it’s a surgical procedure that uses electrical current to destroy tumors or lesions, but I basically guessed that as soon as he said fulguration because the Latin word fulgur means lightning.
How gorgeous is that?
Wonderful.
So Martha Dehis, that’s D-E-H-I-S-C-E, what do we know about that in botany?
Well, it’s exactly what Janet said. It has to do with opening up, and it’s such a beautiful metaphor.
And am I right in remembering that that his root might go back to words meaning to yawn?
Or gape, yeah.
Or gape, how about that?
Yeah. Yeah. So it’s just a beautiful example of metaphor making in science, which goes, you know, all the way back to at least the time of Galen in the second century BCE.
The word plethora, that was originally a medical word that meant an excess of body fluid or excessive volume of blood.
And it came to be used in the English language simply as a term for a whole lot of things.
And now you’ve got me thinking about, you know, if you go to Greece and you see a moving van, sometimes it says metaphor on it.
How about that? It’s the word that gives us metaphor, but in modern Greek, it means both metaphor and transportation.
So you’re transporting one idea to the other.
Janet, if we just let her go, she’ll keep going and going and going.
She’s a rock rolling down a mountain.
Well, I think about the tendon that runs on the inside of the thigh that’s the sartorius, which is named for the position that tailors used to sit in.
Or that when your arm goes to sleep, there was a term for having a loved one’s head on your arm that made it go to sleep.
Oh, I didn’t know that one.
I’m going to have to find that one.
Really?
Oh, that’s fascinating.
Yeah, I mean, you go up your arm. The biceps literally means two-headed because it’s a two-headed muscle.
You know, it’s got an attachment at each end.
And muscle itself. You know, the word muscle comes from the Latin musculus, which means little mouse because it looks like a little mouse twitching under your skin.
I mean, yeah, as Grant says, I could go on all day about this.
There’s poetry in your anatomy.
I love it.
Martha is completely herself.
That’s a diplomatic way to put it.
Janet, thank you so much for your question about this. I hope your hand is doing better.
Oh, it is. Everything’s perfectly knit back together.
Very good.
Ooh, knit. That might be another metaphor for all we know.
It would indeed.
Call us again sometime, Janet. This was good fun.
Take care of yourself.
Bye-bye.
Thanks for calling.
You’re welcome, and thanks for answering.
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