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I just received the following book:  P.N. Singer and Ralph M. Rosen, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Galen (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2024).  The volume has 29 chapters, the last of which is "Galen in Premodern Tibet and China: Impressions and Footprints" (pp. 658-674) by Dror Weil and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim.  Naturally, this chapter is of great interest to me.  It mentions many parallels and correspondences between Galenic and Sinitic medical practice and thought (e.g., humors, colors, purging, etc.), much of it passing through what is called "Islamicate" (Huíhui 回回) medicine and pharmaceutics, and through Persian literature as well.  The authors also take into account Sogdian, Syriac, and Sanskrit sources.

Of all the instances of Galenic thought and practice in China mentioned by the authors, the one that struck me most powerfully was this:

One record gives an account of a surgery on a boy’s head that experts in Islamicate medicine (Huihui yiguan 回回醫官) performed in order to extract a tumor. The tumor, interestingly, is described in this Chinese record by the term little cancer (xiao xie 小蟹), a literal translation of the Arabic sarṭān (cancer). (p. 664)

We may pursue English "cancer" back through Latin to Greek:

Borrowed from Latin cancer (“crab”), a calque of Ancient Greek καρκίνος (karkínos, “crab; ulcer; cancer”) (possibly cognate), applied to cancerous tumors because the enlarged veins resembled the legs of a crab. Doublet of canker and chancre.

(Wiktionary)

 

Old English cancer "spreading sore, malignant tumor" (also canceradl), from Latin cancer "a crab," later, "malignant tumor," from Greek karkinos, which, like the Modern English word, has three meanings: a crab, a tumor, and the zodiac constellation represented by a crab. This is from PIE *karkro-, a reduplicated form of the root *kar- "hard."

Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen, among others, noted similarity of crabs to some tumors with swollen veins. The Old English word was displaced by French-influenced doublet canker but was reintroduced in the modern medical sense c. 1600. In reference to the zodiac sign, it is attested from late Old English; the meaning "person born under the zodiac sign of Cancer" is from 1894. The sun being in Cancer at the summer solstice, the constellation had association in Latin writers with the south and with summer heat.

(etymonline)

 

The name "Carcinos" is a transliteration of the Ancient Greek word Καρκίνος, which literally means "crab". This is why, according to the version and translation of the myth, the character is not referred to by his original name but only as a giant crab, the Crab or Cancer.

"Cancer" is the translation of the word carcinos into Latin, made by Aulus Cornelius Celsus and collected in his work De Medicina. The Greek term had been used since Hippocrates (460–370 BC) to denote certain types of tumors, because of the resemblance that the Greek physician observed between the lesions and the shape of a crab. Celsus continued to use the analogy and introduced the term that has endured to the present day to denote that group of diseases.

The word Καρκίνος is still used in the Greek language today for several of the meanings of the word cancer. Other words such as "carcinoma" (also used by Hippocrates), "carcinogen" or "carcinology" share the original Greek root, in reference to both the crustaceans and the disease.

…

…the American polymath Richard Hinckley Allen exposes in his work Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning (1899) that the constellation of Cancer was also identified by other peoples, apart from the Greek and later ones, with a crab:

The constellation was known as Cherjengh and Kalakang to the Persians; Lenkutch, to the Turks; Sartono, to the Syrians and perhaps to the later Chaldeans; Sarṭān, to the Hebrews; and Al Saraṭān, to the Arabs; all terms equivalent to Cancer.

— R. H. Allen, Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, p. 108

Paul Jensen relates it to the Babylonian turtle of the 4th millennium BC, and it has also been associated with the Egyptian Scarabaeus sacer of the 2nd millennium BC. The first references to a crab appear during the Mesopotamian Kassite dynasty, c. 1530–1160 BC, and already clearly in the Mul-Apin tablets, c. 1100–700 BC, as Al-lul.

However, no clear origin or influences on the character have come down to the present day, beyond the hypothesis of creation by ancient astrologers to associate the constellations of the Ecliptic with the twelve labors of Heracles, introducing into the Hydra myth the minor character of the crab with which to take advantage of the figure traditionally recognized in the constellation.

(Wikipedia)

Building on the work of scholars like Lucas Christopoulos, Lukas Nickel, E. Bruce Brooks, Brian Pellar, and Richard Barnhart, we continue to amass a solid basis for believing that ancient Greek thought, practices, and images had a discernible / demonstrable impact on the Sinitic world.

 

Selected readings

• "'Language cancer'" (3/25/15)
• "Speaking Cantonese may cause nasal cancer" (9/10/19)
• "Of jackal and hide and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/15/18) — with an extensive bibliography in the text and list of selected readings at the end; one of many such Language Log posts in the last couple of decades

November 13, 2024 @ 7:06 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Language and medicine

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