The Etymology of Embolism
Embolism has had two technical lives, and the modern medical one is the second. The Greek noun embolismós came from the verb embállein (to throw in), built on bállein (to throw) — a verb so productive in Greek that it gave us ballistic, parable, problem, symbol, hyperbole, and many others. In Late Latin embolismus was a calendar term: an embolism was an extra month, day, or interval inserted into a lunar calendar to keep it aligned with the solar year. Medieval English used embolism in this calendrical sense from the 15th century. The medical sense is much younger and very precisely datable. The German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, working in Berlin in the 1850s, identified the mechanism by which a clot or piece of foreign material formed in one place could travel through the circulation and lodge in another, blocking a vessel. He needed a clean Greek-derived term and adopted embolism in 1854. The medical use rapidly displaced the calendrical one, and today embolism is essentially a vascular term.