Critical care

Entry twenty-three is la tracheotomia, and its first half carries an old mistake worth knowing about. The Greek physicians called the windpipe trakheia arteria, the rough artery. Trakhys means rough or rugged, and the tube really is ridged all the way down by its rings of cartilage, so it feels rough under a finger in a way the smooth vessels beside it do not. Arteria was at that time a name for any pipe thought to carry air, because the vessels found empty in a body after death were taken to do just that. Medicine later dropped the noun and kept the adjective on its own, which is why the trachea is, strictly speaking, called « the rough one » and nothing else. The tail of the word is plain: -tomia is a cutting, the same element as in « anatomy ». So la tracheotomia names an incision into the rough pipe, and it is worth holding apart from the opening left there afterwards, which both languages call a tracheostomy, la tracheostomia, on stoma, a mouth.