Analgesia and anesthesia: etymology and literary history of related Greek words.

G reek is a particularly cultivated language and has been used to express and refine philosophical and scientific concepts for more than 30 centuries. It is not by chance that international scientific language has formed, and continues to form, many of its terms by borrowing Greek roots, words, or word parts (1). The ancient Greeks were preoccupied with what we now call the “theory of language.” Plato, in his dialogue Kratylus, examined the history of names and claimed that words, as names of things, were directly connected with the objects they indicated (2). If we learned the names of things, therefore, we could easily understand the things themselves, because the study of the language then formed the only method of scientific research and discovery (2). Today, the original meaning and use of current medical terms in ancient Greece is not widely known. In this article, the etymological, linguistic, and literary aspects of words of Greek origin, used in current anesthetic practice, are examined. The described words of Greek origin are presented in Table 1 with their Greek spelling, meaning, and etymology.