Question

What does the Latin is a dead language mean? How both Latin and Greek managed to survive in the world of medicine?

Answer 1

During the 5th and 4th centuries, the oldest written sources of western medicine are the Hippocratic writings, which covered all medical terms. Since Romans had no similar medical tradition and imported Greek medicine. During this time a Roman aristocrat by the name of Aulus Cornelius Celsus wrote De Medicina, which was an encyclopaedic overview of medical knowledge based on Greek sources. Celsus faced the difficulty that most Greek medical terms had no Latin equivalents, and the manner in which he solved this problem by importing a few Greek terms directly even with grammatical endings, he Latinized the Greek words, writing them with latin letters and replacing Greek endings by Latin and also retained the Greek anatomical terminology by translating Greek terms into Latin. This is how Latin and Greek are managed to survive in the world of medicine.