[The medical language as document and source for the history of medicine]

The medical language of the Western world is a cultured language that has been continually growing for many centuries. The aim of the article is to show how a historical acquaintance with this language enables us to obtain not only the individual primary technical message from a written text of the past, but the secondary one too, the metamessage, as, for example, information concerning the cultural level of the medical class, its social and legal status, the sanitary conditions, medical theories, etc.