Rheumatismos

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The ancient Greek medical term for a painful condition believed to arise from a flow of bodily humours, and the root of the English word rheumatism
2. A historical Greek name for an illness of aching joints and muscles that physicians once blamed on the movement of fluids through the body
3. In classical medicine, a term for a flux of humours causing pain and stiffness, which later gave rise to the modern English word for joint disease

Etymology: Ancient Greek physicians thought this condition came from a flow. "Rheuma" meant "stream" or "flow," from the verb "rhein," to flow, and it was used for the discharge of bodily fluids that was believed to cause illness. Pain in the joints and muscles was blamed on humours moving through the body and settling where they did not belong, so the name described a theory of the body as much as a set of symptoms. The same root sits behind "rhythm," which came from "rhythmos," a regular movement or flow, and "rheum," the watery discharge from the eyes or nose. English took the medical term through Latin medical writing, and it kept the sense of something flowing through the body that the Greek writers had given it. Modern medicine no longer accepts the fluid theory, but the name still points back to it.