Medical Terminology With Glorious Gloria

Yesterday Gloria Lemay covered medical terminology in her online Midwifery 101 class. While Gloria finds the linguistics associated with midwifery fascinating, I must confess this was not a subject matter that excited me much. Having said that, of course I still learned plenty of interesting facts, which I will share.

I had assumed that the purpose of medical terminology was to make knowledge inaccessible to the public and keep the field of obstetrics exclusive to the highly educated doctors. Gloria, however, said this was not the case. In her view the purpose of medical terminology is to give birth workers shorthand expressions in order to communicate quickly and accurately. She said that accuracy when talking to a group of birth workers about a woman's body is rather important (and rather tricky, given you are speaking about someone else's body).

Gloria spoke about roots, prefixes and suffixes and the fact that most medical terms come from Greek or Latin. Some words provide us with a lovely insight into the values of these ancient cultures, the best example of which comes in the word "perineum." Peri is a prefix meaning "around" and neum means "temple." Gloria shared that in ancient times the vagina was seen as the "seat of the soul," whereas today the heart is more closely associated with the soul.

For more of Gloria's info on medical terminology you can check out this blog post: Deciphering your medical records.

In this weeks class Gloria is covering prenatal clinic visits (that's antenatal clinic visits to those of us who don't speak Canadian ;P which was another topic covered yesterday. For $7.99CAD you can join me in class.

Also, my friend Nat is blogging her own impressions from Gloria's classes here.

*Featured image source.