Hackett (2016) p/b 370pp £41.99 (ISBN 9781624664649)
This is indeed a big book, but in this case Callimachus was wrong: it more than fulfils the claims of the title. Indeed, such is the detail into which it goes that it is difficult to see how readers ignorant of the basics of Greek and Latin in the first place could hope to digest the huge amounts of information contained in it. But that is the Americans for you: if you are going to do it, do it properly. One is reminded of beginners’ Greek courses produced in the USA. They all start with about twenty pages on accents.
It is important to make this point because THC is designed as a course-book, and in this reviewer’s opinion even students who had the basics of the two ancient languages would find the demands hard to meet. It is not only detailed, but also relentless. There are also niggles: e.g. pellis (‘skin’) has nothing to do with pello; the base angi- (‘vessel’) would not explain ‘angina’; Celsus does not get his historical due; and so on.
But this is mere pin-pricking. The fact is that, as a resource for those interested in the subject, it is hard to see how it could have been bettered: it is simply fabulous. Printed on glossy, almost-A4 size paper, it concentrates on Latinised medical terms and combines in each of the twenty-eight chapters model explanations of the structure of medical terminology (prefixes, suffixes and roots), their various combinations, compounding and consequent meanings; vocabulary lists; exercises thereon (what is ‘laparohysterosalpingooophorectomy’?); an introduction to the Greek alphabet, though oddly no subsequent use of it; and copious side-boxes covering the history of ancient medicine, quotations from ancient doctors, medical terms interesting in their own right, discussions of ancient and modern medical practice, and beautiful colour illustrations of the whole human anatomy complete with naming of parts, from afferent and efferent lymph vessels, via eccrine sweat glands, splenic flexures, saphenous veins, the sexual organs and the zygomaticus to the palatine tonsil, mitochondria, coccyx and finally cells, plants and ants. There is an index of all the word-elements, but such is the splendid variety of other material covered that one would also have liked a more general index for that too. There is an accompanying website hippocratescode.com which gives an idea of the range of material it covers and offers yet more for practice and enlightenment.
All in all, then, a magnificently rich, diverse and often surprising linguistic, cultural and historical vade mecum for anyone interested in the roots of our medical world and its terminology. It should be a must for all doctors. The book is distributed in the UK by, and also available from, gazellebooks.co.uk as well as bookshops.
Peter Jones