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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.
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