Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Massage and malaria
December 11, 2020
Three words reflecting two types of Chinese therapies can be found among the biomedical words first cited from 1979 in the
Oxford English Dictionary (
Table 1. Biomedical words (n=38) in the
OED for which the earliest citations are from 1978 (out of a total of 228); I have found five antedatings, from 2 to 84 years Antedatings: ecotoxicity (1978), transposase (1978), lentivirus (1977), parvoviral (1977), tui na [t‘ui na] (1895)
Tui na, from two Chinese words meaning to pull and grasp, is a type of therapeutic massage, a sort of mixture of acupressure and qigong. The 1979 citation in the