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Joyce Kiefer |
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ARCHAIC MEDICAL TERMS
Whatever happened to lumbago and dropsy?
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
The obituaries for Senator Thomas Eagleton recall the "nervous breakdowns" that got him removed as George McGovern’s running mate in the 1972 election for president. The word they use now to describe that condition is “depression.”
Terms for emotional and medical conditions can become as dated as polyester suits or high buttoned shoes. The name changes but the malady lingers on.
Nerves have a history of causing trouble under various labels. When I was a child in the ‘40’s, my mother said that nerves made my aunt “high strung,” causing her to react too quickly and too extremely for most people’s tastes. Nerves made me restless and fidgety in the classroom when things got boring–a “nervous” child, the nuns declared. They might have called me “hyperactive” in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s and a victim of “attention deficit disorder” today.
Back in the 1800’s, nervous illness that was more like depression went by the mellifluous name neurasthenia. Two years ago the Smithsonian American Art Museum sent an exhibit to Stanford University called “Women on the Verge: The Culture of Neurasthenia in 19th Century America.” Neurasthenia was a national preoccupation, according to the press release. Medical authorities called it the new malady of modern life. It was reaching epic proportions in the U.S. After the Civil War the belief grew that full schedules, machinery noise, and other aspects of industrial life had a detrimental effect on the health of women.
A co-worker and I squeezed in a visit to the exhibit during the noon hour of a day with too much to do at the office. We stared at the portraits of elegantly clad women staring languidly into space or supporting a brow with a graceful, white hand. If only, we agreed, these ladies would give the servants a day off, they might have something to focus on, such as dust, dirty dishes or mud prints in the marble hallway. They might invite Jacob Riis to a 10-course dinner and have him bring his photographs of the slums. Life could be so much worse.
It could also be said that these women were on the verge of “the vapors.”
The other day my husband suffered an attack of lumbago after pulling a sofa bed up the stairs. This was my parents’ term for lower back pain. The name sticks in my mind because it rhymes nicely with plumbago, a shrub with clusters of blue flowers that I liked as a child. The web tells me lumbago is an archaic term.
Also archaic is my mother’s admonition when I came in from the cold: “Don’t warm your feet by the furnace vent. You’ll get chilblains.” She meant perniosis. That would be itching and burning of the extremities resulting from my exposure to moist cold before entering the warm house. Whenever my cat stretched out by the vent, I pulled her away so she wouldn’t get chilblains all over her body. That put me in danger of cat scratch fever.
In my mom’s thinking, my biggest threat was catching a “death of a cold” from playing outside in the chilly air without a head scarf. Earlier in the 1900’s I could have caught the ague, pleurisy, or la grippe. Would the after effects cause postnasal drip or an inflammation of the mucus membrane called catarrh?
That strange spelling alone was enough to strike fear–double “r’s” followed by “h”-- just like pyorrhea, the old term for gum disease, and diarrhoea. In this Age of Immodium we’ve removed the “o” from the last malady. At least it looks better in print.
The fear factor also followed the sickness called dropsy. As a child I pictured kidneys becoming unfastened and splashing into the pelvic basin. But my dictionary tells me that dropsy is now an infectious disease of fish. Edema–swelling of the tissues--is the new dropsy for humans.
With each war we read about wounds that go far deeper than a bullet can reach. Soldiers return from combat with excessive arousal of the autonomic nervous system, emotional numbing, and persistent reliving of traumatic incidents. In World War I these soldiers were shell-shocked. In World War II they became victims of “battle fatigue.” In Iraq they suffer from “post-traumatic stress syndrome.”
As I look at my schedule for next month, the third weekend in April looks completely toxic to the human nervous system. How can I survive without an attack of apoplexy or dyspepsia? Thursday warms up with a reunion dinner of my fellow San Jose State journalism majors in nearby San Francisco, which conflicts with a possible work-related dinner and with an extension class I signed up for when all the squares on the April calendar were blank. Friday goes one better. I spend the day helping run a conference at Stanford. Meanwhile a group of college girlfriends arrive in town for a Saturday reunion luncheon of the honorary society we belonged to in school. I’ve invited them to gather at my home after a dinner I’ll arrange but can’t attend due to work. They are welcome to spend the night. We should be able to chat for an hour before I go to bed early because I have to get up before dawn on Saturday for another day of the conference. That night my grade school has a 75th anniversary dinner, which I plan to attend.
Sunday the grade school–or is it my fellow J-majors or the people at Stanford–is having a special Mass followed by a picnic. It’s on my calendar.
Neurasthenia, here I come.
©2007 by Joyce Kiefer. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted March 26, 2007.
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