Greek myths still sit in the neurosurgical lexicon

This paper is about names that neurosurgeons still say out loud. It starts with the word. Mythology, it says, is derived from the Greek for “study” (logos) and “myth” (mûthos): a symbolic narrative concerning the early history of a people or a natural phenomenon associated with religious belief. That is an etymology and a definition in the authors' own sentence, not a claim that every culture's stories work the same way. They then place Greek mythology among the oldest and richest of all mythologies — “considered,” in their wording. Between that judgement and the medical lexicon they insert a historical bridge: a Renaissance revival of ideas inherited from classical Greek culture, and Italian anatomists, including Vesalius, Leonardo da Vinci, and Fabricius, performing human cadaveric brain studies under the watchful eye of the Roman Catholic church. The paper's “therefore” follows from that bridge. It is, they write, understandable that more than 90% of medical jargon have either Greek or Latin roots, and that the mythological-religious connotations of these cultures have found their way from antiquity into the modern neurosurgical vernacular. This article, they say, reviews the origins of terms used in daily neurosurgical practice, with regard to the deities and monsters that underpin them. The particular gods and monsters are not this page's three claims. How those god-and-monster tales were supposed to work is the next answered beat.