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AbstractThe terms relating to the human body and its organs, to sickness and health, have evolved over the centuries, its vocabulary expanding or contracting in phases. A "layman's" vocabulary existed before physicians communicated in French, that is, before the 16th century, in oral and printed texts. After the Renaissance, this folk vocabulary, enriched with learned terms, became the sole medium of communication between professionals. The net gain of the 16th century was however not continued into the following century. In the 18th century, marked by a rise in the number of interpretative theories of disease, physicians needed many abstract terms, while surgeons found concrete terms for their acts. Medicine at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century incorporated vocabularies of the many sciences it drew from. The phases in the evolution of medical terminology do not run parallel with the increasing efficiency of medicine. The appreciation of these phases is in part subjective, as dictionaries do not give a clear enough idea of the actual use of terms, and it would be hard to envisage quantitative diachronic studies. Over the centuries, physicians' terminological imagination has been fertile, but an over-luxuriant neology has resulted in a rapid turn-over, and the percentage of "wastage" has been high.