Forensic medicine

The twenty-sixth entry is l’asfissia, and the word does not say what almost everybody assumes it says. It was built in Greek on sphyxis, the beating of the pulse, with the negative a- in front of it: literally, a stopping of the pulse. The physicians who coined it were describing a body with no detectable heartbeat, not a body with no air, and the word carried that meaning for a long time before medicine moved it over to breathing. Today l’asfissia names what happens when oxygen fails to reach the tissues, but the older sense is still visible in the family the word belongs to: Italian calls the cuff that measures blood pressure lo sfigmomanometro, and English calls the same instrument « sphygmomanometer », both of them going back to the Greek verb sphyzein, to throb. That is more than a curiosity on a page like this one, where l’asfissia stands next to l’annegamento. The name of the finding points at the heart while the finding itself is read off the airways, which is a useful reminder that a term of art is a label and not a definition.