Religion: Cutting Words

Doctors at Cleveland’s Lakeside Hospital flocked to the operating room after reading the bulletin board notice: “Am-ygdalectomy today . . . 11a.m.” Instead of a rare cutting job, the operation proved to be a routine tonsillectomy.

“Amygdalectomy” (literally, removal of almonds) has slipped into the dictionaries because medieval medicine men, looking at tonsils, were reminded of almonds. The Cleveland notice was posted by Dr. Normand L. Hoerr, professor of anatomy at Western Reserve University and managing editor of the New Gould Medical Dictionary, published this week (Blakiston Co.; $8.50). Dr. Hoerr thinks that all such terms should be discontinued. Also ripe for cutting, he felt, were terms built on researchers’ names. Example: the New Gould has no entry for Bright’s Disease (chronic nephritis), mentions it only in a note on Richard Bright.

The editors of the New Gould, which took five years to prepare and cost $287,000, sanction three pronunciations of gynecology: with the first syllable as “jin” (favored in Philadelphia), or as “guy” (commonest in New York), or as “jy” (scattered). The volume also recognizes the fact that a Bostonian has his bellyache in his o&-domen, while most other Americans get theirs an accent lower—in the abdomen.