2929: Leeches and Doctors Dec 28, 2024

Doctors can feel like a leech on your wallet, but that’s not why the words were related in Old English. In Old English, a hospital was lǣċehūs, literally ‘doctor-house’ (and also literally ‘leech-house’) which survived into Middle English as  lechehous before being replaced by ‘hospital’. Indeed, lǣċe had widespread use in compounds, basically meaning ‘medical-’ as in lǣċeseax (medical sword*) i.e. scalpal, or lǣċedōm i.e. the field of medicine, and lǣċebōc which was a book of remedy recipes. All of these were eventually replaced, usually from Romance vocabulary.

The connection between lǣċe meaning ‘doctor and ’lǣċe meaning ‘leech’ is probably due to the widespread practice of bloodletting, though likely not directly. The root seems to have originally meant ‘doctor’ or perhaps more generically ‘healer’, but was reinforced by another root meaning ‘to tear; to suck’ that was applied to the bloodsucking parasites. 

*Seax is a particular type of sword and the namesake of the Saxons, both of Britain and of Saxony in modern Germany.