Master Medical Latin: 196 Flashcards from Prescription Shorthand to Disease Names

This is not Cicero's Latin. The Latin Medical & Scientific Terms deck on Flip It (deck code SB0430, 196 cards) teaches the working Latin still printed on prescriptions, anatomy charts and discharge summaries — the vocabulary you need to read, not to compose.

What 196 cards actually cover

The deck runs in clean blocks, which makes it easy to split into sessions:

1. Prescription shorthand (15 cards) — a.c., p.c., b.i.d., t.i.d., q.i.d., p.r.n., p.o., STAT, h.s., q.d., plus O.D./O.S./O.U. and A.D./A.S.
2. Prepositions (4) — ante, post, cum, sine.
3. Anatomy nouns (34) — caput, cranium, cerebrum, cor, pulmo, hepar, gaster, ren, sanguis, vena, arteria, nervus, musculus, cutis, oculus, auris, nasus, lingua, dens, fauces, cervix, humerus, brachium, manus, digitus, thorax, dorsum, columna vertebralis, crus, pes.
4. Positional adjectives (10) — superior, inferior, anterior, posterior, dexter, sinister, medialis, lateralis, profundus, superficialis.
5. Suffixes (10) — -itis, -ectomy, -otomy, -pathy, -logy, -algia, -osis, -oma, -rrhage, -scopy.
6. Signs, symptoms and pathology (70) — febris, tussis, vulnus, cicatrix, fractura, oedema, ulcus, abscessus, necrosis, atrophia, hypertrophia, metastasis, erythrocytus, thrombocytus, medicamentum, unguentum, nosocomium, nutrix.
7. Specialties (17) — cardiologia, nephrologia, obstetricia, orthopaedia, otolaryngologia.
8. Disease names (36) — pneumonia through sclerosis.

Twelve real cards

Three things to fix before your first review

Disambiguate the homographs — the deck does not. Two cards share the back os: bone (os, ossis) and mouth (os, oris). Reversed, that card is unanswerable. Write the genitive on both. Same problem with three more: cervix is the neck in Latin but the uterine cervix in the clinic; humerus is the shoulder in classical Latin but the arm bone in modern anatomy; tumor means swelling, not neoplasm — which is why card 121 (Swelling → tumor) and the -oma card are not saying the same thing.

Front-load the 39 free cards. In 39 of the 196 cards the Latin is spelled exactly like the English front: abdomen, diagnosis, prognosis, cancer, virus, paralysis, nausea, necrosis, metastasis, hyperplasia, asthma, diabetes, tuberculosis, insomnia, amnesia, arrhythmia, thrombosis, stenosis, cirrhosis, fibrosis, sclerosis and every -itis in the deck. Clear them in one fast pass so your review queue reflects the words you genuinely do not know.

Know which cards are Greek. The title says Latin, but block 5 is Greek-derived (-itis, -osis, -oma, -algia, -pathy, -logy), and so are gaster (Latin: ventriculus), cephalgia (dolor capitis) and the -cytus trio. Harmless for clinical reading, a trap if you are being examined on Latin roots specifically.

One clinical caveat worth memorising

Cards 9–15 teach abbreviations that are correct historically but discouraged in modern prescribing: q.d., h.s., O.D./O.S./O.U. and A.D./A.S. all appear on error-prone-abbreviation lists because they are misread (q.d. as q.i.d., OD as "right eye" or "once daily"). Learn them to decode old charts; write "daily", "at bedtime", "right eye" instead.

The four cardinal signs on cards 121–124 — rubor, tumor, calor, dolor — come as separate cards, but memorise them as one chant with functio laesa fifth; they are always tested together.

For the classical side of the language, the 500 most common Latin words deck pairs well with this one.

Open Flip It, look up SB0430 (Latin Medical & Scientific Terms), and start with the 15 prescription cards — they pay off the fastest.