The Etymology of Gonorrhea
Gonorrhea is one of those medical words preserving an ancient mistake. The Greek physician Galen, working in Rome around 130 AD, observed the urethral discharge characteristic of the disease and assumed it was involuntary loss of semen — gonos meaning seed, rhoia meaning flow. The misdiagnosis lasted seventeen centuries. Only in 1879 did the German physician Albert Neisser identify the actual culprit, a diplococcus bacterium now named Neisseria gonorrhoeae in his honour. The English language picked up gonorrhea through Latin in the early 1500s, just as syphilis was sweeping Europe and physicians were scrambling for a vocabulary of venereal disease. The two were often confused with each other and with other infections until the late 19th century cleared things up. The same Greek root rhein (to flow) gives us rheumatism, diarrhea, catarrh, and the river Rhine.