Abstract
When interpreting the names of medical instruments, one is usually facing two difficulties : medical texts rarely specify the tool to be used for one or another treatment, and even more rarely offer a description of it. Hence the structure of these names may be considered as a decisive clue to their meaning. As such, πυουλκός ‘pyoulcos’ might seem to be a typical example, since its predictable meaning, ‘pus extractor’, is confirmed in the description of the instrument provided by Heron of Alexandria’s Pneumatics. However, a careful study of the texts in which πυουλκός occurs, and especially of a difficult passage of Galen’s Method of Medicine (10.340 Kühn), shows no evidence of use of this tool corresponding to its name ; in addition to this, it is mostly used for injecting purposes. These observations allow us to formulate a hypothesis concerning the origin of the term πυουλκός ; moreover, this exemplary case of discrepancy between the name of an object and its function contributes to emphasize the caution required while assessing the motivation of ancient terms, given the permanence, throughout the centuries, of denominations, which are subject to loss as well as gain of semantic compositionality (resp. demotivation and remotivation).
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