A short history of ‘glomerulus’

After enjoying Kettritz’s and Luft’s Nephroquiz [1], I enjoyed even more their reply [2] to my comment, which they ended by posing an interesting dilemma: should we use the terms ‘glomerulus/glomeruli’, masculine gender, or ‘glomerulum/glomerula’, neutral gender? Though I am not a learned scholar (only relying on my four-year high school Latin, long forgotten), I have done some homework and delved a little into the history of the word as well as of the nomenclature of the renal structure we now call ‘glomerulus’. In the fourth century, the Byzantine physician Oribasius (Pergamon 325-Costantinople 403), chief doctor to the staff of the emperor Julianus the Apostate, described in his Snopsis the circulation of the kidney [3] as composed of “τα σωματα των vɛφρωv” (ancient Greek for renal bodies) and defined the anastomosis of the renal artery with the vein through the capillaries, using for the first time the term ‘Tριχοɛιδής’ (capillary, hair-like). The first microscopical description of the ‘glomeruli’ dates back to the work of the Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694, Figure 1 [4]), who in ‘De renibus’ a section of ‘De Viscerum Structura Exercitatio Anatomica’ [5], published originally in Bologna, Italy in 1666, and in London in 1669, gave an accurate description of their structure; he did not denominate them ‘glomeruli’, though, defining them as dark vascular structures resembling fruits suspended on a branch (... quae sanguineis vasis atro liquore turgidis in speciolae arbori formam productis, velut poma appenduntur) or ‘glandulae’. The term ‘glomerulus’ actually belongs, rather than to ancient, to modern Latin, with its first recorded use, according to the Merriam’s Webster and the Oxford dictionaries [6, 7], dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. It appears to be derived from the ancient Latin word ‘glomus’ (plural glomera), third declension, neutral gender, which means ‘a clew, ball made by winding’ [8]. The term ‘Glomus’ transgendered into masculine in the seminal dissertation ‘de Structura renum’ (1782, Figure 2) [9], written by Alexander Schumlanski (1758–1795) for his doctoral thesis at the Universitas Argentoratense (Strasbourg, France). Schumlanski deduced by experimenting on pig kidneys, a connection between the circulation and the uriniferous tubules, many years before Bowman proved his theory to be correct. Schumlanski in his dissertation in Latin (the international language of science at those times) used the terms ‘glomeres’ and ‘glomeres glandulosos’, masculine gender. A few decades later, in 1851, Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs published his work on Bright’s disease [10], in which he alluded to ‘glomerulus’ as ‘kapsel’ or ‘Capsula Malpighii’. Almost at the same time, William Bowman (together with Robert Bentley Todd) [11] established a definite connection between the glomerular circulation and the urinary