Syringes and Syringomyelia

The earliest description of cavities in the cord is generally ascribed to Charles Estienne (1504–c.1564) in La dissection des parties du corps humain... Paris, 1546. But the fi rst use of the term ‘syringomyelia’ was probably that of Charles P. Oliviers d’Anger in De la moelle epiniere et ses maladies in 1824; in a later two-volume work he described: ‘Syringomyelie ou cavite centrale dans la moelle’. The association with the Arnold-Chiari malformation was later recognised . ‘Syringotomy’ was the operation to open any type of fi stula by means of a ‘syringotome’; it is recorded in 1753, but was then not related to the neurological illness. The name ‘syringe’, used since the early 15th century in English, interestingly relates to the alternate sucking and blowing of water to and from the respiratory organs that enables the Syringograde animals to swim. The beautiful fl oating echinoderm Holothuria is an example. What have a common, spring-fl owering, scented, garden shrub, a channel in ancient rocks, an old wind instrument and the voice-box of birds in common? Answer: a syrinx. Syrinx (plural – syringes) comes from the Greek syrinx, surinx – a pipe, tube, fi stula or channel. Syrinx was the mythical musical pipe of Pan in Greek legend, often fashioned from reeds. In John Keats’s Endymion we fi nd: ‘Pipes will I fashion of the syrinx fl ag.’ (Keats was famed as a poet but was also a medical doctor who died tragically young of tuberculosis.) The word ‘syrinx’ has other interesting contexts. In archaeology, for example, a syrinx is a narrow rock-cut channel or tunnel, classically found in ancient Egyptian burial vaults. For ornithologists the syrinx is the lower larynx, the organ of the voice (shades of the merry merry pipes of Pan). Syringa vulgaris, the generic name of the lilac, was fi rst applied to the beautifully scented Philadelphus (mock-orange) shrub, because its hollow stems were used for pipe-stems. Later Linnaeus applied the term to the lilac , formerly called the ‘pipe-tree’. ‘Syringobulbia’ (Latin bulbus – onion, or bulb) we know as the abnormal cavities in the medulla that dissect into the slits in the cord’s grey matter as ‘syringomyelia’ (Greek myelos – the marrow), and ‘syringotomy’ is the operation made to drain the cavity (Greek tomos – cutting). Received: September 15, 2005 Accepted: September 15, 2005 Published online: January 6, 2006