[Katarrus, chrapota, slinogorz--names and treatment of laryngeal diseases on the basis of 15th and 16th century relics of Polish language].

The paper outlines the beginnings of the process of naming laryngological diseases in the Polish language, and is based on 15th and 16th century relics of the Polish language. The authors relied in their analysis on the registers, as well as practical health guides such as herbarium books and strictly scientific medical manuals. Most of old Polish names of illnesses include original names based on the observation of the symptoms of illnesses and their clinical aspects. A great number of synonyms, both native and derived from foreign words, deserve special attention, indicating that attempts must have been made to find appropriate terms, which would best express the characteristics of a given illness. The presence of names derived from Latin and Greek should be attributed to the attempts at unifying medical terminology. Over the centuries, as the language and medical science have developed, names of illnesses have undergone a number of changes. It should be noted that numerous names derived from old Polish are still applied as medical terms.