How Infinite in Faculty

Medicine and Health Rhode Island, Dec 2003 by Aronson, Stanley M

The practicing physicians of Rhode Island are graduates of over one hundred different medical schools situated here and abroad. The curriculums of these geographically diverse medical campuses may not be identical but certainly the names given to their teaching staff are essentially interchangeable. Titles such as instructor, professor, faculty, provost, even dean, are readily understood by both students and staff of these medical institutions.

The origins of these titles, now used globally, may be traced to the Classical languages of the Mediterranean basin via the teaching and administrative terminology of the early Roman Catholic Church.

The word, instructor, from the Latin, instruere, meaning to prepare, to build up, to teach, is further derived from the Latin, struere, meaning to pile up [a definition which many hard-pressed medical students would heartily agree with.]

Professor is from the Latin professus, meaning to affirm, to admit, to lay claim to, or to claim proficiency in. To profess had originally been employed to describe the process of taking religious vows and had been almost synonymous with the word, confess, meaning to avow or to declare one's commitments-and eventually, one's sins. And thus the words professor and a confessor, once parallel in meaning, have now significantly diverged.

Faculty is derived from the Latin, facultas, meaning capability or power; it is derived, still earlier, from the Latin, facilis, meaning easy. English words such as facile and facilitate more clearly show their roots in an older Latin word meaning easy. A Latin word meaning not easy, disfacilis, evolved into the English word, difficult.

Provost is from the Latin, praepositus, through the Old High German word, probost, and eventually to the English word, provost, meaning a prefect [ such as prefect of police] or a governing authority.

Dean, an English word currently meaning one who is in charge of a teaching unit within a university, had originally been restricted in meaning to those in charge of a large church or other ecclesiastical unit. The word has broadened its meaning, of late, to define any senior individual in some definable group [e.g., the dean of sports writers.] The word takes its origin from the Greek root for ten [deca-] from whence came words such as Decalogue [the Ten Commandments], decimal, decameron, and decade - but not decadence which is from the Latin, decadere, meaning to fall down or to corrupt.

The Latin decanus had originally described a leader of ten, usually ten soldiers. In the early years of the Church a decanus was the head of ten monks and eventually head of a cathedral or a theological seminary. The word, decanus, shrunk eventually to the English word, dean. Words such as dinar, doyen, decimate and decussate are therefore all derived from the Greek root meaning ten. How the word, decussate [an X-shaped crossing of nerve fibers] got its name is somewhat indirect. The Roman "X" was both a symbol of an intersection as well as the icon for the numeral ten. And thus, by metaphor, the medical term, decussate, was born.

STANLEY M. ARONSON, MD