Saying Grace in Latin

I once heard the story of an anatomist who was invited to dine at High Table at an Oxbridge college. Prior to dinner, he was being shown around and was asked if he would be willing, as an honoured guest, to say Grace before dinner. He immediately agreed. He was then informed that Grace was always in Latin and asked, ‘You do have Latin, don’t you?’ Too shamefaced to admit that he knew no Latin, he responded, ‘Of course.’ Then came the dilemma of how to say Grace in Latin without knowing a word of the language. But of course he did; he suddenly realised. He was an anatomist. Much of the body was named using Latin terminology. So he thought of the longest Latin descriptor he could think of. That was a small muscle beside the nose—the levator labii superioris alaeque nasi. So when the time came, he intoned the muscle’s name, added ‘Amen’ at the end, and he got away with it.

FYI—Levator labii superioris alaeque nasi means 'raiser of the upper lip and wing of the nose.' But you knew that, didn't you?

See also: An Anatomical Wordbook (pp14-21).

Addendum

Since writing and scheduling the publication of this post, I have come across the following in chapter 6 of Richard Gordon's 1957 novel 'Doctor in Love'. A much older doctor explains to the Gordon... 

"Of course, since my day they've got an anglicized the whole anatomical nomenclature," he went on. "Which is a pity because it gives the medical profession at least the appearance of being educated like gentlemen if they can mouth a few Latin words occasionally. I remember the time I found myself asked to say grace at some luncheon or other. I bowed my head and intoned: 'Levator labii superioris alaeque nasi, Amen.' A small muscle in the front of the face, you will recall. No one was any the wiser."

This is obviously a story that has done the rounds.

Water 2

Among the earliest Greek philosophers—now commonly known as the pre-Socratic philosophers—stands Thales of Miletus* (c. 626/623–c. 548/545 BC). Living around 150 years before Socrates, he is often considered not only among the first chronologically but also among the foremost for the quality of his thought. Among his work in geometry, he is remembered eponymously in Thale’s theorem. However, it is not necessarily for the scientific accuracy of his thought that he is still held with some regard. It is also for his attempts at trying to make sense of the world; attempts that missed the mark. For example, Thales thought that the Earth floated on water.

Of interest here is that he held water to be the first principle—or arche—of everything. That is, everything in nature was based on a single elementary substance, which Thales proposed was water. Although it may seem odd to us today, in the ancient world this view became widely influential.

Socrates took a different approach. He questioned how we could be sure about our views. He famously refused to speculate about such matters. Such a proposal as Thales’ would not have fit well with him. However, how much of a speculation is it to suggest that water is the ‘first principle’?

Apart from the scientific basis of water for life (see an earlier post) water has a special place in human experience. This is because of its physiological importance.

Viewed in terms of physics, water is a molecule: one of the most widely known. Many who do not know what ‘H2O’ means in the scientific sense have heard of it and are aware that it relates (in some way) to water.

Water is made of elements—hydrogen and oxygen; it is a molecule and not itself an element. But as a molecule, water does have a fundamental position with respect to life. Indeed, the search for extraterrestrial life typically goes hand in hand with the question of liquid water being present. That is, not just ‘H2O,’ which may be in the form of ice or vapour, but ‘liquid H2O.’

Water provides a physical medium within which the processes that gave rise to life can take place. That is where the processes that characterise life first occurred and now continue to take place. All organisms, whether they are plants or animals, are water-based. No living thing is devoid of water. To be devoid of water is to be lifeless—even dead.

An interesting creature is the tardigrade. This tiny creature can resist considerable environmental extremes—including exposure to outer space—without dying. They can take on an inactive state when put to extremes and return to life afterwards when returned to a normal environment. One extreme that they can withstand is desiccation.

However, as I understand it, liquid water may be lost, resulting in the tardigrade taking on an inactive form called a ‘tun.’ However, despite desiccation, some water molecules remain within the substance of the quiescent tun. This is because of the presence of the sugar trehalose. Indeed, other organisms that can also withstand desiccation also have this mechanism. While this is not the only mechanism available to the tardigrade—for example, it is able to modify certain structural proteins in response to desiccation—water nevertheless has a fundamental place in its continued existence—even when inanimate.

I am not aware of any of the existentialist philosophers ever giving water much attention in human existence. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre briefly discusses the experience of being-in-the-world in relation to the element of water, but this is not a major part of his philosophy. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, uses the image of a river to represent the absurdity of human existence, but again, this is a passing reference rather than a central theme.

Only the philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote about the symbolism of water in his book Water and Dreams. He explored how water is often associated with purity, life, and the unconscious. However, Bachelard was more of a phenomenologist than an existentialist, and his focus was on the imaginative experience of water rather than its existential significance.

* Mietus was a Greek colony in Ionia on the western coast of Asia Minor and so not in the territory that forms modern-day Greece.

Circulation Figures (Human)

Here—after my digression (posted 5 minutes ago) about AI-generated images of the human circulation—are some images from a book first published in 1964. Both come from ‘Principles of Pathology’ written and illustrated by Howard Carl Hopps. This is the only book I can think of that has two quite different illustrations for the same thing. This reflects the different contexts and ways in which Hopps is referring to the circulation in the text. This is a practice that might be more widely adopted. The structure and workings of the human body can be envisaged in numerous different ways at the same time. Diagrams and figures should be allowed to express this.

Again we see how the same system can be depicted differently by different illustrators/authors.

Circulation Figures (AI)

This is an extra post prior to posting another in my series of diagrams of the human circulation. This is to warn you about the potential dangers of AI-generated images. 

Just to see what I might get, I asked an AI image generator to make an image of the human circulation. This was a generator that had produced nice pictures before, but I had not asked for figures or illustrations. I had hoped to post what I was given. To say that the results were dreadful is an understatement.

While there was some anatomical similarity with the human body, there were subtle inaccuracies and false impressions. AI-generated images must be carefully checked before they are used or relied upon.

I recently heard that two things that AI cannot do are produce an image of a person writing with their left hand and an image of an analogue clock face showing a specific time. Drawing from what is on the internet, AI predominantly finds images of people writing with their right hand and clock faces registering ten-to-two (a standard in advertising). So AI has known limitations, which I’m sure will be overcome.

In my requests, what was particularly bad was the labelling; it was complete gibberish. It consisted of very strange combinations of letters and partial letters. Drawn from the internet, the labels of the images used do not seem to be read as text but taken as part of the image. Connecting the right labels—where there were readable labels—to the appropriate structures was non-existent.

This may only be a temporary thing. This time next year perhaps I should try again. For the purpose of providing figures and illustrations, AI still has a lot of developing to do. In the meantime, students and teachers should be cautious.

Eponyms 1

One of the things for which anatomy used to be famous was its eponyms. An eponym may be a person, place, or thing from which something takes its name. Perhaps the most famous but overlooked eponym is the sandwich. Although there is disagreement over how the eponym came about, all agree that it was named after John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich.

Most anatomical eponyms are named after people. But there have been a lot of people doing a lot of work on the same things. Some structures have been named more than once. Some have merely identified a structure; others have come after and done detailed work on its structure and function. After whom should such a structure be named?

Eponyms are particularly problematic in that they usually contain no indication of where in the body they are located and may lack anything to indicate to what they might refer. This is an obvious problem for the student—or at least, it was. Fortunately, the use of eponyms has been discouraged. Beginning in 1895 with the Nomina Anatomica, the aim has been for a standard nomenclature for anatomical structures. This was superseded in 1998 by the Terminologia Anatomica.

Unfortunately (for some), the nomenclature used is often based on Latin. Without a basic knowledge of Latin, one may have difficulty remembering the terminology.

That said, a ligament I found very easy to remember when first learning anatomy was Poupart’s ligament. From its name, one could at least surmise that it is a ligament of sorts. It is a fibrous band in the groin. It is now called the inguinal ligament, which provides an adequate description of where and what it is.

The eponym is rather distinctive It has nothing to do with the smell (poo!) of the parts near to which it is situated (or so I used to, light-heartedly, tell my students). Although that was a perfect way of remembering where it was. I did not know it at the time (and I don’t think my teacher ever knew) that it was named after the French physician, anatomist and entomologist François Poupart (1661-1709).

As noted above, a common problem with eponyms is that they are sometimes named after more than one person. That is the case with Poupart’s ligament. It is sometimes referred to as the Fallopian ligament, after Gabriele Falloppio (1522/23-1562), who is most famous for another eponymous structure, the fallopian (now uterine) tubes.*

It was Falloppio who first described the inguinal ligament. It was Poupart who highlighted its clinical relevance in relation to inguinal hernia. Based on that, who merits the eponym? (The simple answer is, ‘Neither; eponyms are no longer used!’)

Furthermore, Poupart’s ligament is sometimes confused with Colles ligament after Abraham Colles (1773-1843)—perhaps most famous for Colles fracture—a common form of wrist fracture. Colles ligament is also in the groin but is correctly the ‘ligamentum inguinale reflexum—triangular fascia’ or nowadays ‘reflected inguinal ligament (triangular fascia).

*(Surprisingly, the fallopian tubes still go by the eponym on Wikipedia, where the following note is given…

“Though the name Fallopian tube is eponymous, it is often spelt with a lower case f from the assumption that the adjective fallopian has been absorbed into modern English as the de facto name for the structure.”)