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Sample page four from A Dictionary of Medical Derivations
cancer Latin, crab, a disease of malignant tumours
Both early Greek and Roman physicians used their nouns for crab to refer to the disease. The English words canker and chancre derive from cancer, crab, Latin. Cancer as a crab is one of the signs of the zodiac.
The Roman doctor Galen (A.D. 131-201) like many of the best physicians of the Roman empire was a Greek who wrote in Greek. His writings summarize ancient anatomy and medical procedure, adding new observations based on his own practice. For fourteen hundred years Galen's writings were the authority on medicine in the Christian world. Galen wrote that cancerous veins [sic] extend out from the disease site like the claws of a crab.
Another early medical writer claimed that, like a crab, cancer reaches out when it metastasizes and seizes many different parts of the body.
Much earlier than Galen, in the Hippocratic school of ancient medicine, karkinos also referred to a non-healing ulcer, and karkinoma was a malignant tumour (a cancer). The Greek word for crab is karkinos. Carcinoma is karkinos plus the common suffix -oma,which has the medical meaning of benign or malignant tumour or swelling.
A Note on Medical Euphemism and Cancer Jargon
Suppose a bedridden person has just been told he has cancer. In the initial days of his adjustment to this fact, his attending physician may have to refer to the cancer and may judge the blunt word too unbearable to repeat in front of his patient.
Years ago, a doctor could have used the word carcinoma and been reasonably sure most patients would not have known this synonym for cancer. That is not always true today, when public awareness of the major diseases and the vocabulary used to describe them has grown. But medical jargon provides a long list of euphemistic alternatives. Doctors can and do refer to cancer as "the mitotic figure," "a neoplasm," or "a neoplastic figure." If a cancer has spread to form new foci of disease distant from the original site, they might say "the mitotic incident has metastasized." But plenty of patients know and fear the word "metastasis." So more obscure levels of technical language and circumlocution may have to be plumbed, as when a physician might refer to one specific cancer site as a "melanosarcomatous excrescence." In general, however, obscure technical jargon is not necessary during doctor-patient interchanges. Even in medical literature, one seldom needs to call a black eye "a circumorbital hematoma." Naturally, that is not said to deny the legitimacy of specialized medical vocabulary items like cholecystostomy. On the other hand, yes, there are compassionate reasons for employing euphemism now and then in the practice of medicine.
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