Tweet
The illuminated medieval treatise on veins that illustrates our title today probably got it wrong too. It’s about the misuse of the word cephalic.
Cephalic is an adjective used in medicine and biology, meaning ‘pertaining to the head.’ Cephalic derives from the ancient Greek word for head, kephale.
We’ll show some of its uses in modern English words in a moment. For example, encephalitis means inflammation of the brain. Egkephalos in ancient Greek is literally ‘what’s in the head,’ that is, the brain.
But there is a cephalic vein that has nothing to do with the head.
The cephalic vein carries used blood anteriorly up the arm and then empties into the axillary vein.
So why is a vein of the arm labelled with an adjective meaning ‘of the head’? Cephalic vein is a clumsy, confusing, anatomical label. It is a 600-year-old medical mistake that still looks stupid. Well then, will those in charge of medical terminology correct the error? Not on your life!
The cephalic vein is an example of a badly named body part, and a thus confusing medical word, all based on a translator’s mistake. Some important early medical texts were in Arabic, for example, the Canon of Avicenna. He was a Persian physician named Ibn Sina ( 980-1037 CE), known in European languages as Avicenna, who wrote books collecting the medical knowledge of his times. The Canon of Avicenna was an important textbook in medieval medical schools, with more than 14 editions in the fifteenth century alone.
In Avicenna’s Arabic, this vein of the arm was named al-kifal ‘the outer (vein of the arm)’. When the Canon was translated into Latin in A.D. 1564, the translator thought al-kifal was related to Greek kephalikos ‘pertaining to the head’ and its Latin form cephalicus. He was wrong, but the naming error stuck, and became sanctified by tradition as vena cephalica in Latin and cephalic vein in medical English. This refusal to correct what is obviously an error happens too often in the conservative realms of medical nomenclature.
تعليق