Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Leukemia
/luːˈkiːmiə/noun
A cancer of the blood-forming tissue that floods the body with abnormal white cells.
The Greek roots
λευκός
leukós
white, bright
αἷμα
haîma
blood
Literally: “white blood”
The story of the word
Rudolf Virchow examined a patient in 1845 whose blood settled into a thick white layer and called the condition weisses Blut; two years later he swapped the German for Greek and it became Leukämie. He was arguing against the assumption that the whiteness was pus from some hidden infection. The same λευκός names the leucocyte and, further out, Leucippus the atomist, whose name means white horse.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
leucocyteanemiahemorrhage
In a sentence
Childhood leukemia went from almost always fatal to mostly survivable in one generation.