Abstract
An authorism is a made-up word. But, of course, many medical words are made up, most combining Greek and Latin prefixes, suffixes, and roots. A medical neologism becomes an authorism when we know who coined the term and how it was introduced into the medical lexicon. Familiar medical authorisms, their authors, and the backstories covered in this chapter include pellagra (Francesco Frapolli, 1771), angina pectoris (William Heberden, 1772), anesthesia (Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1846), sarcoid (Caesar Peter Møller Boeck, 1889), radioactivity (Marie and Pierre Curie, 1898), and chemotherapy (Paul Ehrlich, 1910).
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Taylor, R.B. (2017). Medical Authorisms and Their Creators. In: The Amazing Language of Medicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50328-8_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50328-8_8
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