It all started with a simple tweet by @MDaware
“ER docs are problem solvers for the hospital” #LAC17— Seth Trueger (@MDaware) March 12, 2017
Chris Carrol corrected him
I think you spelt “ICU docs” incorrectly https://t.co/qacqUfd6Bd— Chris Carroll MD MS (@ChrisCarrollMD) March 12, 2017
And I piled on
Nephrologist starts with N, even in the original Latin. https://t.co/UkuKi7xEdF— Joel Topf, MD FACP (@kidney_boy) March 12, 2017
As I was posting this I was thinking. Nephrology is Greek. What ever, no one will care. Yeah, right.
Sorry, @kidney_boy , I can’t resist! `Nephros’ is Greek. https://t.co/taBs4fkjWL— Paul Lawton (@pauldlawton) March 12, 2017
@pauldlawton @kidney_boy can confirm- wife’s family is Greek, they are the only folks I don’t have to explain what a nephrologist is— Chuck Varnell, MD (@CVarnellMD) March 13, 2017
The reason I knew that nephrology is Greek goes back to the early days of the The Fluid and Electrolyte Companion. We were planning the book and Sarah Faubel and I wanted to have a lot of little icons for little interesting factoids for the book. Here is the key for what made the cut:
But in earlier versions we had a lot of other icons. And one of the ideas was to have an icon for medical Latin but quickly we found that most words we wanted to define were actually Greek. We created a Medical Greek Icon, but it didn’t really work so we ended up using the light bulb. Here is an example of Medical Greek as found in the Book.
This is what the unused medical Latin icon looked like:
