Interactive Medical Terminology Dictionary (An Obsidian Vault with a demonstration video)
If you’re studying medicine (or if you’re a patient who gets worried that your doctor may be possessed by Beelzebub), you may have struggled to understand and memorize all of the crazy medical terms. Given that this community is learning-adjacent, you’re probably aware that it’s more beneficial and also easier to understand the rationale and the system that produces an outcome rather than simply memorizing that outcome. That’s where this obsidian medical dictionary vault comes in.
I made a dictionary (inspired by Dunmore and Fleischer’s Medical Terminology: Exercises in Etymology textbook) that defines and links most of the 600+ “high yield” medical Latin and Greek roots (the prefixes, the combining forms, suffixes, and suffix forms). Each root is a note, so if you’re able to break down a medical term and search those roots, you will be able to figure out what a term means. Further, each root uses a dataview query to find all other medical terms that derive from it, so you can learn that root in context. After all, we don’t learn our native languages through flashcards; we learn them by hearing them used in relation to different words and stimuli. There are a lot of other cool applications for this dictionary, like finding synonyms and partial synonyms. There’s also a table that compares and contrasts similar roots, and another that aggregates them into a more traditional alphabetical database style.
Being familiar with even a portion of the roots in the dictionary will drastically improve your ability to parse through odd-sounding medical terms, and hopefully the method I used to link everything within its context will help you find what you’re looking for, enable you to learn about it quickly, and use that knowledge even when you don’t have your computer on hand.
Here is the video I made demonstrating the uses for this vault. The vault itself is downloadable from this link.
Here is an alternative article I wrote about the dictionary, with a real-life example: What is nephrolithiasis? (Hint, drink some water my dudes)