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001 Basle Anatomical Nomenclature
 Through the history of mankind language has grown and evolved, and anatomical nomenclature was not exempt from this natural growth and evolution. The mid eighteenth century saw the first reliable English dictionary with Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language. The first dictionaries in essence were produced in an effort to weed unsatisfactory words out of the English language, and to streamline the language to a proper form. Similarly, the medical community saw anatomical terminology growing to an unpractical size. There was no consistency in terminology for the structures of the human body, resulting in a sort of chaos in the medical industry. It was this chaos that prompted a group of the late nineteenth century's most distinguished anatomists to put forth an effort to give each structure of the human body one name, eliminating synonyms until the complete list of anatomical structures was trimmed from more than 30,000 to a little over 5,000. In his history of anatomical nomenclature, Dr. Lewellys F. Barker praises this effort as "an achievement for which both students and teachers of the subject must be thankful" (2). |
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