Back in the day, the legal system in the UK deliberately divested itself of some Latin terminology in favour of more modern terms. I think the idea was to open up law a bit to the common man. A lot of legal terms are still thinly veiled Latin, with a soupcon (yes the cedilla is missing - this is English) of Anglo-Saxon and obviously: Old Greek, mashed in. It will make for better telly anyway ...
You might think that medicine should follow suit and it has in its own inimitable way. I have spoken to doctors that are capable of dealing with arses as well as rectums.
All walks of life involve jargon. Law and medicine are famous for being a bit abstruse but that is unfair ... maths, physics and co look shifty and keep quiet. No need to draw attention to themselves.
Engineering is of course a paragon of parsimonious discourse amongst practitioners. Well, engineers are not known for their florid prose but, given the complexity of engineering and the breadth of the term itself, language is going to need to get complicated. Within Civil Eng alone I recall fourth or fifth order differential equations and that's "just" maths.
So, we have three old Greek derived postfixes that are used within medicine. I think they mostly involve cutting, investigation and removal in various combinations, to whatever is the stem word. I'm not a doctor.
Another driver for medicine is the need (sometimes) to avoid miscommunication in noisy and fast-paced scenarios (think emergency response, operating rooms when things aren't going well). So along with avoiding colloquial language, there is sometimes particular pronunciation taught.
To add to other comments, a positive thing with Latin and Greek jargon is that it's not intentionally obtuse, but a combination of stem words aiming to make up literal terms. Anesthesia for example means literally "not feeling". If there wasn't an influence of the classics to the natural sciences it could be notfeeling or notfeel in English.
I find that doctors in the UK are very well trained to communicate using common English with patients. They will generally never use medical jargon without being prompted, defaulting to the simplest English first[0], and if they do use medical terms then they generally introduce them. It must be a particular focus of UK medical education.
[0] every GP says “tummy” instead of stomach or abdomen, something I find a bit infantile, but it does get the job done.
You might think that medicine should follow suit and it has in its own inimitable way. I have spoken to doctors that are capable of dealing with arses as well as rectums.
All walks of life involve jargon. Law and medicine are famous for being a bit abstruse but that is unfair ... maths, physics and co look shifty and keep quiet. No need to draw attention to themselves.
Engineering is of course a paragon of parsimonious discourse amongst practitioners. Well, engineers are not known for their florid prose but, given the complexity of engineering and the breadth of the term itself, language is going to need to get complicated. Within Civil Eng alone I recall fourth or fifth order differential equations and that's "just" maths.
So, we have three old Greek derived postfixes that are used within medicine. I think they mostly involve cutting, investigation and removal in various combinations, to whatever is the stem word. I'm not a doctor.