Vulnus sclopetarium (gunshot wound).
Imagine a word slowly moving toward extinction, its derivation never fully elucidated, and whose absence would leave the world of words a diminished landscape. Such is the case with sclopetarium. Further imagine a physician encountering and treating a patient in the emergency room who has been victimized by a gunshot wound, and in the patient discharge process, the treating physician loads the words vulnus sclopetarium into the International Classification of Diseases-10 (ICD-10) finder, (1) only to discover that it shoots blanks. Reload gunshot wound into the system and the program will respond with 30 retorts. On the a la carte menu, six variations of gunshot wound, including the officially approved abbreviation "GSW" and the fuzzier "reported gunshot wound" are coded T14.8. The "S" category presents 21 options in our institutional ICD-10 program, all signifying a gunshot wound to a defined anatomical location, an ICD-10 version of the 21-gun salute. For example, "gunshot wound of hip" is S71.009A. In the direction of darkness, an "infected GSW" has its own category, L08.9, balanced by the more comforting option "healing gunshot wound," W34.00XD.'Tis a shame that such an edifying phrase as vulnus sclopetarium has faded from the medical vernacular. The term came to my attention when a graduate student, speaking at a history of medicine conference, enlightened me about St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC.1 During the Civil War, wartime conditions necessitated repurposing part of the hospital to treat injured and sick military personnel. The admission log includes numerous entries heralded by two letters, VS, an abbreviation for vulnus sclopetarium. The translation for vulnus is wound (n.); (plural vulnera). (2)
Translating sclopetarium and tracing the etymology presents more challenges. No guns were present in ancient Rome; therefore, the language was bereft of any word for them. The Chinese invented black powder about 900 AD. Over the following few centuries, the firearm, utilizing and weaponizing black powder as the explosive, evolved from prototypes such as the fire lance and hand cannon. By the 13th century, a recognizable gun was making its way westward via the Silk Road, as both merchandise and protector of merchandise.
The word gun likely derived from a 14th-century Scandinavian word, gunhildr, and an elided version made its way into Middle English by the Welsh (gwn) and Irish (gunna). The English had christened a huge crossbow-like weapon, installed in the 14th century at Windsor Castle, as Domina Gunilda (Lady Gunilda), which hurled its formidable ammunition toward the enemy. Gunnhildr, a proper female name in Scandinavia, is the union of two Norse words, gunnr and hildr, each synonyms for battle. (3) According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), "gunne, may represent a hypocoristic form of a Scandinavian female name compounded with Gunn." (2,4) Furthermore, Norse legend has it that many Scandinavian women were feared and respected warriors, apparently inspiring among the English a fondness for christening their daughters with Scandinavian names. (5) The etymological leap of faith uniting guns and women is supported by recognizing a male tradition of "be-towing [sic] personal female names on engines of war" and in more modern times, extending that nominate behavior toward other inanimate objects such as cars or boats. Perhaps marital counseling has its origin somewhere in this hybrid penumbra of weapons and femininity. The popular World War II habit of pilots artistically adorning the front of their bombers with the female form, typically scantily clad, represents another version of juxtaposing the fairer sex with weapons of war.
The verb shot arrived on the scene about the same time as the noun gun, as noted in this 1386 quotation from Chaucer: "Whan thy worthy kyng Richard was slayn with shot." To be sure, the OED does include the word gun-shot, but only in the hyphenated form. The OED does offer a 1471 quotation: "They were so annoyed in the place where they were, as well as gonnes-shott as with shot of arrows." (4)
Navigating the etymological road from gonnes-shott to sclopetarium proved to be a difficult journey. Peter Hassler, writing in The New Yorker, noted that "when complex ideas pass through so many lenses, distortions are inevitable," as evidenced by the influence of Arabic translations of classic Greek texts. (6) These Arabic translations were the texts that came to the Western European world in the 11th century and gave an Arabic-nuanced flavor to the Greek and Latin legacy of language, as it was retranslated into Greek.
Delving into the Internet revealed a dearth of insight on the genesis of sclopetarium. Stephen Greenberg, PhD, at the National Library of Medicine, was able to locate one of the earliest known variants of the term, a 1552 book by Bartolomeo Maggi, De Vulnerum Sclopetorum, et Bombardarum Curatione Tractatus (translated by Google Translate as "Of His Assault Rifles, Mortars and Healing Treaty" (7); S. Greenberg, personal communication, August 14, 2017) (Figure 1). Maggi (14771552), an Italian surgeon, received a briefreference to his novel thoughts on management of gunshot wounds in a book of essays on early and modern medicine. (8)
Vulnus sclopetarium appeared sporadically in early 20thcentury medical articles, such as in "Un cas de vulnus sclopetarium orbitae" from the journal Acta Radiologica in 1924. (9) More recently, a Serbian medical journal presented this description of surgical repair of a gunshot wound:
32-year-old patient self-injured the region of the right lower and upper leg by shotgun during hunting in 2005. The same day the patient was operated on in a tertiary traumatology health care institution under the diagnosis of vulnus sclopetarium femoris et cruris dex; AVfistula regpopliteae dex; fractura cruris dex. (10)
Another early use of sclopetarium appears in a 1722 book titled Dissertatio Inauguralis Medico-Forensis qua Vulnus Cerebri Sclopetarium by Johannes Adolphus Seyffert. (11) More recently, singer-songwriter Herbert Mullin released a song, 211 seconds in length, called "Vulnus Sclopetarium," which is included in the 1991 hardcore rock compilation album, Killed by the Machinery of Sorrow, a truly poignant reference to guns.
Various Civil War-era hospital admission logs also demonstrate use of the term. Specifically, at the National Archives and Records Administration, perusal of the Register of the Sick and Wounded at St. Elizabeths in Washington, DC, showed 1864 admissions between November 2, 1861, and April 29, 1864. (2) For 162 cases, the admitting diagnosis was "V.S." Inexplicably, in a series of admitting diagnoses, V.S. variations were interspersed, such as vulnus sclop (three times), vulnus sclopet (once), and G.S.W. (twice). The site of the injury was sometimes entered, such as "vulnus sclop (left foot)" (Case 752, p. 19, June 29, 1862) (2) (Figure 2). Use of the term vulnus sclopetarium seems to have reached a zenith during the American Civil War. Why the term has fallen from favor is uncertain.
Deconstructing sclopetarium provides insight. -Arium as a suffix is defined by the OED as a "thing connected with or employed in place for" and evolved into the suffix -ary. The original version, -arium, remains associated with "a few terms of classical and ecclesiastical antiquities, or of learned use." (4) Words such as planetarium, vivarium, herbarium, and aquarium come to mind as places to attend for study, learning, and observation. Returning to the OED, in search of words similar to sclopet, I was rewarded with this find: sclopeta. Perhaps the plural of sclopeta was a variant spelling of the singular sclopette or escopeta. Sclopeta appeared in a 1709 quotation from Sir Richard Steele's Tatler No. 34, F: "His [the antiquary Don Saltero,*] double-barreled Pistols, Targets, Coats of Mail, his Sclopeta, and Sword of Toledo." ([dagger])
This ensemble of words--pistols, targets, coats of mail, sword, and sclopeta--holds promising connections. The next word in the OED is sclopette (also spelled esclopette--a small holstered gun used in the time of Charles I, and escopette--a carbine used in Mexico), which is a hand-culverin or hand-gun used in the late 14th century. The culverin developed into a longer version known as a cannon, a word used interchangeably with gun in earlier times. Culverin may have its roots in colubro, meaning snake-like, referring to the length of later culverins, up to 13 feet, and that may explain why cannons once carried the nicknames of reptiles (Figure 3).
Further mining of an array of dictionaries provided unexpected etymological treasures. From the Oxford Latin Dictionary, the onomatopoeic scloppus is defined as the "sound made in striking something full of air." (12) This could be construed to represent the pre-gun-era equivalent of words such as bang and pow. Embellishment of this whimsical notion is encountered in an 1895 tome regarding gunshot wounds. "The term sclopetum was selected as indicative of the sudden noise produced by the discharge of a gun, and was derived from the Roman sclopus, signifying the explosive report produced by a person quickly striking his two cheeks after they have been extended by holding his breath, ([double dagger])" as reported by the military surgeon Longmore. Longmore further stated: "The adjective sclopetarium was taken from the word sclopetum, a gun--a term which appears to have been first employed about the date of the application of gunpowder to destructive weapons." (13) He also quoted the revered Italian anatomist and surgeon Fabritius ab Aquapendente (1537-1619), who referred to bullets as "globuli plumbei a sclopetis emissi" and to gunshot wounds as "vulnera e globulis sclopetorum facta." (13) Longmore offered more insight, noting that what to call battlefield wounds was once a topic of nomenclature debate and evolved its own history. The Registrar-General of England had compiled a nosological classification incorporating "Lessons from violence leading to sudden death," a subsection being Polemici, which "included all lesions resulting from battle; and among them, of course, the particular lesions produced by gunshot, which were at the time designated 'Vulnera Sclopetaria.'" (13)
There is a botanical angle to sclopetum to explore. An 1826 lexicon identified a salve, sclopetaria aqua, "so called for its supposed virtues in healing gun-shot wounds. Arquebusade. It is made of sage, mugwort, ([section]) and mint, distilled in wine." In Pharmacopeia Bateanna, balsamum sclopetarium is described as "a balsam for gun-shot wounds." (14) The next entry after sclopetaria aqua is sclopetoplaga, succinctly defined as a "gun-shot wound." (15) Now presented is a plausible hypothesis for the etymology of vulnus sclopetarium. What remains unclear is the marriage of sclopeta with the suffix -arium. Having torn asunder sclopetarium, reconstruction proved vexing. Wound and gun seem clear. What -arium has to do with gun is murky. To say that gunshot wound victims are objects of medical scrutiny and that the battlefield or associated field hospital is the "-arium" seems plausible but may be an etymological stretch. Seeking a path out of this lexical crevasse, consultation with William Fletcher, a self-described "free-range artisan and scholar," seemed in order. He noted, from studying a Random House Dictionary, that -avium had a cousin, -orium, "a suffix occurring in loan words from Latin, denoting a place or an instrument: emporium; moratorium." (16) My learned colleague further opined:
This would seem to place equal emphasis on the idea of instrument (the gun), and, by extension, the place where the instrument was used (the gun-battlefield). For example, scriptorium (instrument = writing) or crematorium (instrument = burning). The idea of a place of activity related to the first part of the compounded word would seem to strengthen this postulated derivation. As far as the Latin goes, the two parts appear to be two nouns in the nominative case. These parts are connected only by juxtaposition, rather than any case ending (ablative) (Personal communication, William Fletcher, July 12, 2017).
In other words, two nouns, gun and battlefield, with no apparent lexical connection to each other, are now wed to one another as a neo-Latin word, sclopetarium: the gun is the source of the wound that was typically but not necessarily sustained on the battlefield. Perhaps unwittingly anticipating future ICD-10 requirements for anatomical specificity, in 1885, the Royal College of Physicians revised its nomenclature of diseases, which had three descriptive stipulations regarding wounds in general and gunshot wounds in particular:
In all cases of such injuries the system of classification requires the origin to be specified, whether the gunshot wound is accidental, judicial, homicidal, self-inflicted or received in battle. The particular agent by which the injury has been effected is also required to be stated. Injuries and wounds are further distinguished according to their locality ... of the body in which the injuries have happened to occur. (13)
The above quote provides a formal precedent that further cements our etymological conclusion: proper description of a wound (in our case a gunshot wound) requires an instrument or agent (gun), origin or method (battlefield or other), and location (anatomical). The -arium suffix fulfills the latter two needs, which is consistent with an explanation offered by a legal scholar: "-arium, inferring place, represents not just the battlefield but the anatomic site of bodily injury" (T. R. Todd, Jr., personal communication, September 5, 2017). Sclopet and -arium are now married, and their "originally distinct meanings have become merged." (17) Accomplished grammarians would call this the associative-instrumental case. This writer just calls it his best shot at translating and understanding the etymological genesis of vulnus sclopetarium.
https://doi.org/10.1080/08998280.2018.1444299
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author gratefully acknowledges the following people for editorial and/or research contributions: Herbert W. Benario, PhD (Professor Emeritus, Emory University); William Fletcher, PhD (formerly of Emory University); Stephen Greenberg, PhD (National Library of Medicine); Zachary Parker (PhD Candidate, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); Michael D. Russell, JD (retired, Department of Homeland Security); Hannah Rutledge, PhD, MLIS, AHIP (Emory University); Crystal Smith (reference librarian, National Library of Medicine); Thomas R. Todd, JD; and Sally Wolff-King, PhD (Emory University).
(1.) Hundt B. No neutral ground in this contest: the government hospital for the insane during the American Civil War. Paper presented at: Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science annual meeting; March 17, 2017; Myrtle Beach, SC.
(2.) Register of the sick and wounded at St. Elizabeth Hospital, District of Columbia. Civil War Field Hospital Records, November 2, 1861, to April 29, 1864; Register 94, Vol. 82, Stack 7W2, Row 38, Compartment 8. Located at: National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.
(3.) The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster; 1991.
(4.) Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary 1971. London, UK: Oxford University Press; 1989.
(5.) Editors of Merriam Webster. "Gun" may have come from woman's name in the 14th century. Deseret News. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/604683/Gun-may-have-come-from-womans-name-in-the-14thcentury.html. Accessed July 30, 2017.
(6.) Hassler P. Talk like an Egyptian: learning the language of the prophet and the people. The New Yorker. April 17, 2017:48-57. https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/learning-arabic-from-egypts-revo lution. Accessed July 30, 2017.
(7.) Bartolomeo M. De Vulnerum Sclopetorum, et Bombardarum Curatione Tractatus. Bologna, Italy: Bononiae, Per Bartolomeum Bonardum; 1552.
(8.) Vekerdy L. Paracelcus's great wound surgery. In Furdell EL, ed. Textual Healing: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Medicine. Boston, MA: Brill; 2005:77-100.
(9.) Nordentoft MJ. Un cas de vulnus sclopetarium orbitae. Acta Radiol. 1924;3:528-529. doi:10.1177/028418512400300608.
(10.) Sarac M, Marjanovic I, Jevtic M, Misovic S, Zoranovic U, Rusovic S. Endovascular repair of posttraumatic multiple femoral-femoral and popliteal-popliteal arteriovenous fistula with Viabahn and excluder stent graft. Vojnosanit Pregl. 2011;68:616-620. doi:10.2298/VSP1107616S.
(11.) Seyffert JA. Dissertatio Inauguralis Medico-Forensis qua Vulnus Cerebri Sclopetarium Septima Demum Hebdomae Absolute Lethale. Ghent, Belgium: Ghent University; 1722.
(12.) Glare PGW, ed. Oxford Latin Dictionary. Vol 2. London, UK: Oxford University Press; 2012:1182.
(13.) Longmore T. Gunshot Injures, Their History, Characteristic Features, Complications, and General Treatment: With Statistics Concerning Them As They Have Been Met with in Warfare. London, UK: Longmans, Green, and Co; 1895.
(14.) Bate G. Pharmacopia Bateannas. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
(15.) Hooper R Lexicon-Medicum or Medical Dictionary Containing an Explanation of the Terms. 4th American ed. New York, NY: E. Duyckinck, Collins and Hannay; 1826:858.
(16.) Random House. Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition. New York, NY: Random House; 1968.
(17.) Ohio State University Department of Classics. The ablative case in Latin. https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program/Grammar/Cases/ablative-case-latin. Accessed July 27, 2017.
Clyde Partin, MD
Department of Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia
Corresponding author: Clyde Partin, MD, Department of Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine, 1524 Victoria Falls Dr. NE, Atlanta, GA 30329
(e-mail: [email protected])
Received November 8, 2017; Revised December 31,2017; Accepted January 4, 2018.
* Don Saltero's Coffeehouse in Old Chelsea, known for its collection of curiosities and artifacts, is immortalized in Sir Richard Steele's The Tatler, No. 34, June 27,1709. See the description on the website of Pascal Bonenfant: www.pascal bonenfant.com/18c/clubs/jt_donsalteroscoffeehouse.html. Accessed July 27, 2017.
([dagger]) Swords made from unusually high-quality and hard steel alloy from Toledo, Spain.
([double dagger]) Longmore (13) offered this embellishment in his Notes and References: "Also scloppus. Persius, in his 5th Satire, censuring a pompous style of declamation, writes, 'Nec scloppo tumidas intendis rumpere buccas.' See Delphin edition, London, 1786, p. 363. The word appears to have been sometimes written stloppus orstlopus" (p. 783).
([section]) In Culpepper's Complete Herbal & English Physician by Nicholas Culpepper, published in 1814, there is no mention of sclopetaria aqua or Arquebusade. Mugwort is discussed on pp. 122-123 as an herb of Venus. There is no specific mention of its use for wounds or trauma. This is the book J. K. Rowling consulted regarding potions while writing the Harry Potter novels. Caption: Figure 1. Title page from one of the earliest published examples of the word sclopetarum. From the Italian surgeon Bartolomeo Maggi's book, De Vulnerum Sclopetorum, et Bombardarum Curatione Tractatus (Of His Assault Rifles, Mortars and Healing Treaty), published in 1552. (7)
Caption: Figure 2. Variations in hospital admission ledger entries utilizing V.S., G.S.W., and Vulnus Sclopet. Ledger records for 1890 admissions from November 2, 1861, to April 4,1864, from the Register of the Sick and Wounded. (2)
Caption: Figure 3. Vasa cannon, Vasa Museum, Stockholm, Sweden. A lengthy demonstration was given of why cannons were named for reptiles and typically with female overtones. Photo by author.
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| Author: | Partin, Clyde |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings |
| Article Type: | Report |
| Date: | Apr 1, 2018 |
| Words: | 3037 |
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