I wish I'd taken Latin

I remember in high school, my dad trying to convince me to take some classes in Latin. ("Yeah, right, Dad, how totally boring and useless would that be! Latin is, like, dead!")

Well, it turns out he might have been right... veterinary medicine (actually, all medicine) is full of organisms, body parts, diseases, and adjectives derived from Latin word roots. And it sure helps to remember some of these many, many medical words if you can make some association in your mind with what the word actually means, or where it came from.

Our gross anatomy instructor was really great about helping us with this sort of thing. She taught us almost all of the common roots that indicate certain regions of the body (e.g. "metr" refers to the uterus, so "metritis" is inflammation of the uterus). She also taught us some of the prefixes and suffixes, like endo, ecto, epi, etc.

So we were able to muddle our way through gross anatomy and remember pretty much all the terms we needed to know.

Then comes parasitology. (I know, isn't this like my twelfth post about parasitology this semester?? I'll try to cut back.)

Parasitology is full of fun names like:

Amblyomma maculatum
Boophilus microplus
Psoroptes cuniculi
Ornithonyssus sylviarum
Ctenocephalides canis
Gasterophilus hemorrhoidalis (that one sounds charming, eh?)
Cochliomyia macellaria

Here's one from bacteriology, one of my new favorites:

Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae

It turns out that most of these names are probably derived from Latin roots that actually mean something, and may in fact relate to something important about that particular bug.

But since I never took Latin, I have to use my meager knowledge gleaned from miscellaneous sources, along with my creativity, to help me remember.

For example:

Rhipicephalus sanguineus.

Okay, I know "cephalo" refers to the head. The Spanish word for blood is "sangre," which sort of sounds like the first part of sanguineus. So we've got "head blood." The start of the first word, Rhipicephalus, actually sounds like "Rip his." Combine that to "Rip his -- head -- blood." Well, yeah, if you rip his head off, that'll be bloody. Voila!

Want to remember what animal Rhipicephalus sanguineus (a tick) uses as its host? Well, ripping someone's head off and getting bloody... that could be a pitbull!* Pitbulls are dogs, and Rhipicephalus sanguineus lives on dogs! Double voila!

That is merely one of many, many examples of why, when talking to a recently accepted future freshman vet student last week, I advised her to learn some Latin in her free time...

*Re: pitbulls. No, they are not mean dogs that rip people's heads off and get bloody. But if I'm scrambling to come up with a memory device, I certainly won't exclude false stereotypes!