Urology

The list opens on o trato urinário, and « tract », the word English puts there, does three unrelated jobs. The first is the one needed here: a tract is a passage through the body along which something travels — a urinary tract, a digestive tract, a respiratory tract — and the noun is never left standing alone in that sense. The second is geographical. « A tract of land » is a stretch of open country, and it is the word a surveyor reaches for. The third is the oldest in print: « a tract » is a short pamphlet arguing a case, usually a religious or a political one, and the writers of one famous nineteenth-century series were called Tractarians ever afterwards. All three descend from the Latin tractus, something drawn out, and the thread shows once it is pointed out: a passage drawn through the body, a strip drawn across the ground, an argument drawn out at length. Portuguese cuts it differently. O trato is the anatomical passage, and it is also the way people deal with one another — o trato com o público — which « tract » has never meant.