Occupational therapy

The twenty-first entry is la prévention des escarres, and the noun in the middle of it has travelled a long way to reach a mattress. Une escarre is feminine, and it names the sore that opens where a body has rested too long in one position. Behind it stands the Greek eskhara, which meant a hearth, a brazier, the place where a fire was kept; Greek medicine then used the same word for what a fire leaves on skin, the dry dark crust over a burn or a cautery. Latin took it as eschara, and French carried it on, writing it with an h for centuries before settling on escarre. English received the word too and kept it narrow. « Eschar » is a clinical term for the crust itself and for nothing else, while the lesion this page is about is « a pressure sore », « a pressure ulcer » or, in ordinary speech, « a bedsore ». So a translator who reaches for « eschar » names the scab and loses the wound. Read l’escarre as the sore, and keep the hearth for the history of the word.