Gastroenterology: Naming a discipline

Abstract

Gastroenterology consolidated into a medical specialty toward the end of the nineteenth century, a development, however, long anticipated by medical terminology. The undefined neologisms gastridiologia and enterologia appear in the preface to a Latin work of medical aphorisms, dated 30 September 1655, by Erfurt physician Valentin Andreas Möllenbrock (1623-1675). Boerhaave and Cheselden used enterologia as an anatomical term from roughly the same date (1711); it is unclear who may have influenced whom. Hepatologie/hepatologia and hepatographie/hepatographia were coined in Tarin's 1753 Dictionnaire anatomique, to denote putative anatomical sub-disciplines.

Keywords: Gastroenterology (term); History of gastroenterology; Medical history; Medical lexicology.