Veterinary medicine

Late in the list stands l’esame autoptico, and the adjective carries a small piece of Greek that decides which English word belongs here. Autopsía is built from autós, self, and ópsis, sight: the seeing done with one’s own eyes, as against taking somebody else’s word for it. That is how the term reached medicine, naming the examiner who goes and looks rather than reasoning from a distance. English borrowed the word and then narrowed it by convention. « An autopsy » is understood to be carried out on a person, and a report on a dog or a cow that uses it reads, to a veterinary surgeon, as though it had come from the wrong building. The word wanted here is « a necropsy », built on the same pattern from nekrós, the dead body — or else the plainer « post-mortem examination », which is what most British practices say aloud and write in the file. Italian draws no such line at all: l’autopsia and l’esame autoptico serve every species, and the animal is named alongside, not in the noun.