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This month's column is part of a series of articles exploring how some of our medical terms are derived from other living things. This one will focus on animal names.
The tragus of the ear is a humble enough structure, but the name has connections to both the serious and the capricious.
On the sad side, the parent word figured in the English word tragedy.
That term entered Middle English from the Old French tragedie, which was tragoedia in Latin, in turn derived from the Greek oide (song) and tragos which meant ... goat.
A tragic play was therefore a goat-song. The hairs that sprout on the cartilagenous structure on older men may have resembled the beard of a male from the genus Capra--or perhaps hairy codgers are just old goats.
Edward Jenner's smallpox serum was made from the pus emanating from the blisters of cowpox. Cowpox was...