WHY THE REVISION WAS UNDERTAKEN 2 



given, as His suggests, for the discussion of fossil questions of priority, but the 

 inconveniences of such ballast were sufficiently obvious. 



As this naming went on by the authors of individual text-books or mono- 

 graphs, a great many terms were proposed which never became current; others 

 were gradually employed in a sense other than that originally intended; some 

 attained to general anatomical parlance. It was the success that a name met 

 with which justified its adoption in the science, although often, as examination 

 has shown, it was fashion which in her imperious way decided, sometimes sud- 

 denly replacing an entirely suitable anatomical term by another, no better. 

 The names arising, as it were, by chance and at totally different periods in the 

 various anatomical systems, it was scarcely possible that anatomical terminol- 

 ogy as a whole could manifest any general plan or have much uniformity of 

 character; it was necessarily chaotic and incoherent, full of inequalities, con- 

 tradictions, and obscurities. 



The distinguished German anatomist, J. Henle, when writing his well- 

 known treatise, felt keenly the faults of the inherited terminology and made a 

 great effort at improvement. In his text-book of anatomy he gave only one 

 name to each structure, banishing all synonyms to the footnotes; he waged war 

 against personal names, and replaced them by objective terms, urging that his- 

 torical injustice was frequently done by their retention. It is to Henle, also, 

 that we owe the introduction and consistent use of those excellent terms of 

 orientation, the words sagittal, frontal, medial, lateral, etc. But even as great 

 an anatomist as Henle could not simplify anatomical terminology satisfac- 

 torily without the sympathetic cooperation of other anatomists. Each great 

 medical school had to a certain extent its own anatomical language, and the 

 physician who tried to read articles in which the terms of schools other than 

 that in which he had been brought up were used met with irritating difficulties. 

 A student going from one university to another often found that the anatomical 

 expressions acquired with great difficulty in the one had to be supplanted by 

 another set of terms, equally hard to learn, in the other. 



This harmful and humiliating state of affairs stirred up in anatomists in 

 various countries a strong feeling for the necessity of remedy. Anatomical so- 

 cieties in America, in Germany, and in Great Britain interested themselves much 

 in the problem. In America it was Professor Burt G. Wilder, of Ithaca, who felt 

 most keenly the need of reform in terminology. He deserves great credit for his 

 efforts to stimulate other American anatomists to a realization of this need, as 

 well as for the time and labor he has given to attempt to improve and simplify 

 anatomical terms.* He writes me that the matter of terminology was definitely 

 brought before the American Association for the Advancement of Science as long 

 ago as 1880, and states that in connection with the revision of terminology in 

 America the names of Messrs. Gage, Gerrish, Gould, Huntington, Leidy, and the 

 Spitzkas, father and son, should be mentioned. 



The movement for revision of terminology which originated in Germany 

 in the enlarged Anatomical Society at its first meeting in Leipsic, in 1887, is the 



*Cf. Wilder, B. G.: "The Fundamental Principles of Anatomical Nomenclature" 

 (Med. News, Phila., 1891, December 19); " Macroscopical Vocabulary of the Brain," presented 

 to the Association of American Anatomists at Boston, Mass., December 20, 1890; "American 

 Reports upon Anatomical Nomenclature," 1889-1890, with notes by B. G. Wilder, Cor- 

 nell University, February 5, 1892; "Anatomical Terminology," by B. G. Wilder and S. H. 

 Gage, in the first edition of Wood's Reference Handbook of the Medical Sciences; "Neural 

 Terms, International and National," 1896; "Some Misapprehensions as to the Simplification 

 of the Nomenclature of Anatomy," 1898. The Reports of the Committee of the Associ- 

 ation of American Anatomists may also be consulted. 



