Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Rheumatism
/ˈruːmətɪzəm/noun
An old blanket term for painful, stiff or inflamed joints and connective tissue.
The Greek roots
ῥεῦμα
rheûma
flow, stream, discharge
Literally: “a condition of flowing”
Follow a root:ῥεῦμα1 word
The story of the word
Galenic medicine held that a watery humor ran down from the brain and settled in the joints, so the name records a theory of plumbing rather than a disease. What it covers is dozens of unrelated conditions, from gout to rheumatoid arthritis, which is why doctors dropped the word and kept the specialty called rheumatology. Same ῥέω under rheum, catarrh and diarrhea.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
rheumcatarrhdiarrhearheostathemorrhoid
In a sentence
Her grandmother called it rheumatism and refused every more precise name for it.
Damp weather and rheumatism go together in folklore more reliably than in the data.