Did learning Latin pay off?

[Bellette]

My family's Catholic. Everyone's been to Catholic school, and everyone born prior to Vatican II learned Latin; the six surgeons in my parents' generation all swear it was indispensably helpful in medical school, but they more or less learned it via 12 years of parochial school osmosis. Is there anyone (a contemporary) who would agree it's worth the time to study?

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[DrYoda]

No, it's about useless for the purpose of studying medicine.

 

[Suncrusher]

I took four years of Latin. I wish I had taken Spanish instead, so that I wouldn't be so jealous of the interpreters at the clinic

 

[sindadel]

I found it helpful, but I wouldn't go out of my way to learn it. A primer on "medical" Latin which probably exists somewhere would cut down on stupid mnemonics if you are linguistically inclined.

 

[Laryngophed]

It wouldn't be terribly useful. If you are that concerned, I would take a medical terminology class or Spanish given the likelihood that you'll need to communicate with a Spanish speaking patient at some point.

 

[doc2beIRELAND]

I have a law degree so all that mumbo jumbo I'd picked up came in kind of handy in anatomy but seriously... no, all you need to know is that for every anterior, there is a posterior and so on. You will pick up all the stupid words quickly enough, like 'plexus' is a braid - this comes in very handy at trivia nights when free beers are at stake.

 

[cowme]

My family's Catholic. Everyone's been to Catholic school, and everyone born prior to Vatican II learned Latin; the six surgeons in my parents' generation all swear it was indispensably helpful in medical school, but they more or less learned it via 12 years of parochial school osmosis. Is there anyone (a contemporary) who would agree it's worth the time to study?

You know what would be more useful for learning medical terms than a dead language? A week of anatomy class in high school...

You will learn all the relevant latin-derived medical terminology with or without latin...knowing it will only give you a marginal benefit in the first 3 months of medical school. Why not learn a language that you can actually USE?

 

[docB]

I did three years of Latin in high school.

It did not help in med school.

Agree with those who say Spanish is much more helpful in medicine.

 

[hrandani]

I took six years of latin throughout middle school and high school. We had a great latin program. The spanish courses we had blew hard and the teachers were terrible. I learned more spanish in 3 months in Mexico than my brother did in 4 years.

I feel like taking latin was a great part of my education and really added to my understanding of so many things. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I wouldn't say it's been a great advantage during medical school specifically though.

 

[Mattchiavelli]

I don't think going out of your way to learn latin will be helpful. It is worth it to be etymologically-minded though, in that if you know what serous fluid is and you hear the term seroma, knowing that -oma means a growth, you can know what someone is getting at without running to a medical dictionary for every new term.

 

[ArcGurren]

Learn spanish, please. I didn't learn latin and had no trouble memorizing names of muscles and whatnot in anatomy. I didn't learn spanish either unfortunately and I'm beginning to regret it.

 

[Siverhideo1985]

Latin is a good basis for learning other romanic languages...thats about the only benefit I've experienced from 7 years of Latin throughout my education.

Like others here I would have rather invested my time in Spanish or a language prevelant in the community that you plan on working with.

 

[Perrotfish]

My family's Catholic. Everyone's been to Catholic school, and everyone born prior to Vatican II learned Latin; the six surgeons in my parents' generation all swear it was indispensably helpful in medical school, but they more or less learned it via 12 years of parochial school osmosis. Is there anyone (a contemporary) who would agree it's worth the time to study?

Not helpful any more. Latin, like eponyms, has been very conscioiusly rooted out of our medical vocabulary by the powers that be. I'm not sure how much was left a generation ago, but now basically the only latin words are the ones that weren't particularly worth translating (ex: the sartorius muscle never became the tailor's muscle because, well, does that help?).

Maybe worth studying if you want to study Church history in the origional language, but for medicine my priorities would be foreign languages. Spanish first, then maybe Vietamese, and then whatever's spoken in the area you'd like to live in (Polish for Chicago, etc.)

 

[cyberer]

I double majored in the Classics in college so I know Latin pretty well. As others have said it gives you a moderate advantage in anatomy terminology but other than that pretty useless. Still one time a professor who was from Italy was pimping us in a clinical skills session about Latin and was downright giddy that I knew all the answers to his questions.