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When I use a word . . . The languages of medicines—International Nonproprietary Names (INNs) bmj.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bmj.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
I define “hypercorrection as “incorrectly correcting what’s already correct, wrongly thinking it to be wrong.” The example that is usually quoted when defining the word is “between you and I,” which should be “between you and me.” Apologists for this misuse give several reasons: they say that “you and I” is a compound pronoun in the objective (accusative) case; they say that great writers have often used the form in this way; they say that many people do it now, so it must be OK. All very sophistical. Another example, a medical hypercorrection, is when an e is turned into an ae or an oe , in the belief that the e is an Americanism, just as “anemia” and “estrogen” are American forms of “anaemia” and “oestrogen.” This happens when people write, for example, “pancytopaenia” or “pancytopoenia” instead of the correct form, “pancytopenia.” What they don’t know is that the suffix –penia comes from a Greek word, πενία, meaning poverty. T ....
Like people, words have birthdays. My definition of the birthday of a word is the year in which it first appeared in a written text, as, for example, documented in the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ). Even though many words have had a conversational life preceding their written one, I count that as the fetal stage in their development. Their appearance in the world is marked by their first appearance in print. In some cases the documented birthday can be antedated by finding earlier examples of the use of the word in print; in my experience, this happens to about 10% of biomedical words. Counting anniversaries as having occurred in multiples of 50 years, I have searched for biomedical words whose birthdays fell in years ending in ’24 and ’74 and have found 144 of them. Among these, my favourites are “impostumation,” an obsolete word for an abscess, dating from 1524, as used by William Harvey in prescriptions he wrote in 1653 and 1655 for John Aubrey; “cybrid,” a word stil ....
Medicines are sometimes withdrawn from the market after having been used therapeutically. When that happens it is usually because of some adverse effects or adverse reactions that they have caused. Over the years the delay between marketing and withdrawal in such cases has fallen dramatically. One of the longest delays between the first clinical use of a compound and its withdrawal from the market was that experienced by chloroform, which was first used clinically in 1847 and, although it was known to have caused many deaths and was eventually superseded by better compounds, it was not withdrawn anywhere until 1976 and in the UK until 1979.
There are several possible courses of action that regulators and/or manufacturers can take when a new adverse drug effect is observed or a new adverse drug reaction is experienced. They can simply add a warning to the product label about the possible adverse outcome, or they can add a new caution or contraindication, issue a specific warning ....
In his famous dictum, the 16th century physician and alchemist Paracelsus declared that “Alle ding sind gifft und nichts ohn gifft,” “Everything is a poison and nothing is not a poison,” by which he implied that it was always possible to have too much of a good thing. Today, in contrast, we typically regard poisons as substances that can cause harm in small quantities. However, the 1868 Pharmacy Act, “An Act to regulate the Sale of Poisons, and alter and amend the Pharmacy Act 1852,” took more of a Paracelsian approach, including as it did in its schedule, its list of proscribed poisons, both opiates and chloroform, constituents, along with prussic acid, of formulations known as chlorodynes, which had caused many cases of poisoning. The aim of the act was not merely to protect the public but also to afford a new breed of chemists and druggists and pharmaceutical chemists the right to a monopoly on the dispensing of medicines, while at the same time protecting others, such a ....