RT Journal
A1 Bean WB
T1 THe story behind the word.
JF A.M.A. Archives of Internal Medicine
JO A.M.A. Archives of Internal Medicine
YR 1959
FD May 1
VO 103
IS 5
SP 842
OP 842
DO 10.1001/archinte.1959.00270050164028
UL http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/archinte.1959.00270050164028
AB The fascination words hold is never-ending. The fascination of medical words for a physician has been the theme of many a discourse, paper, and book. Wain turned his hobby of collecting lore about medical terms into a full-time effort. He has selected from almost innumerable medical terms those of particular interest, to tell us something of their derivation, the fun which comes from knowing about how a word got that way, and a chatty little essay about the words he has selected. We might call to question the importance of putting contemporary physicians in a book of less than six thousand entries, particularly when the selection seems to have been based on whimsey or a lack of insight into the real contributions of some included and some excluded. But then, a book of this kind has to be selective anyhow, and no two people would choose alike. The work is