Cardiology

One word on this list hides a noun that an English reader already knows from the butcher’s counter. Der Schenkel is the thigh: der Oberschenkel is the upper leg and der Hähnchenschenkel a chicken leg. In a geometry lesson it is something else again, one of the two arms of an angle, and the two legs of a pair of compasses are Schenkel too. In the heart it is neither. The conducting fibres run down the wall between the ventricles and divide into a right and a left branch, and German calls each branch a Schenkel, where English says bundle branch. Der Linksschenkelblock is therefore a left bundle branch block, a pattern on the trace, and has nothing to do with the legs. What holds the senses together is a shape: two limbs that part from a single point. These pages explain words and give no medical advice.