How do scientists name parts of the body :)

Question: How do scientists name parts of the body :)
- Keywords:
  body part
Asked by 264sprg52 to Andrew, Dan, Emilia, Helen, Katy, LauraAnne, Stephanie on 7 Nov 2016.
- Dan Gordon answered on 7 Nov 2016:
  
  This is very interesting question. To understand this we need to look back in history and at a language which was commonly spoken in Roman times but has in many ways died out, Latin. Almost all of our common medical terms originate from Latin. So for example in Latin the word for what we think as muscle is Myo, while the word they for the heart was cardium hence we combine the two to get the heart as we know it today (Myocardium) which reflects the heart as a muscle.
- Katy Griggs answered on 7 Nov 2016:
  
  The majority of body parts take their name from Greek or Latin. The majority of the words can be broken down into parts, which make them easier to understand. For example myocardium stated in Dan’s answer. There are a few body parts that are actually named after the people that discovered them, such as the Islets of Langerhans that can be found in your pancreas and secrete insulin. They were named after Paul Langerhans who discovered them.
- Helen Hanstock answered on 7 Nov 2016:
  
  I am teaching my students anatomy at the moment so we are learning the names of lots of body parts! Dan and Katy are right, the names often come from Latin and can sometimes be very logical. Once you start to learn some of the terms you can work out what other words mean! For example the sternoclavicular joint is the joint between the sternum (breast bone) and clavicle (collar bone).
- Emilia McAllister-Jepps answered on 8 Nov 2016:
  
  All of the answers above are great! There are also some part of the body which have been named after incidents that have happened to characters in history. An example of this is the Achilles tendon.
  
  Achilles was a Greek hero during the Trojan war, who was killed by a guy called Paris, who shot him through the heel with a poison arrow. The story goes that Achilles mother dipped him by the ankle into the River Styx, to make him invulnerable to weakness…but the ankle that did not get wet was eventually how he was killed.
  
  Not perhaps scientific, but all relating to the language from which the names of our body parts are derived.
- LauraAnne Furlong answered on 9 Nov 2016:
  
  There is one other way body parts get named, and that can be when they are named after someone who has figured out something important about that part of the body. An example of this is Gerdy’s tubercle, named after a French surgeon called Pierre Nicolas Gerdy. If you put your hand on the outside of your knee, and move it slightly downwards, just before you feel a raised bony bit, this is the side of the top of one of the bones in your lower leg. That is Gerdy’s tubercle, and is where something called your iliotibial band is attached (it is quite a common place for a runner to develop an overuse injury)

Question: How do scientists name parts of the body :)

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