Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Nephrectomy
/nɪˈfrɛktəmi/noun
Surgical removal of a kidney.
The Greek roots
νεφρός
nephrós
kidney
ἐκτομή
ektomḗ
a cutting out
Literally: “cutting out the kidney”
The story of the word
Gustav Simon removed a human kidney deliberately for the first time in 1869 in Heidelberg, having practised on dogs to satisfy himself that a patient could live with one. The Greek νεφρός sits in medicine alongside the Latin ren, which gives renal, so the same organ carries two vocabularies depending on which language the coiner reached for. Everything on the Greek side is recognisable at a glance: nephritis, nephron, nephrology.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
nephritisnephronnephrologyhydronephrosis
In a sentence
The donor nephrectomy took under two hours and she was home in three days.
A partial nephrectomy spares the healthy tissue around the tumour.