ethmoid

The ethmoid bone sits behind the nose, a small cube of porous bone riddled with tiny perforations. Its name comes from Greek ethmos, meaning sieve, a common household tool for straining liquids or separating grain. The Greek physician Galen of Pergamon (129-216 CE) named it in his anatomical writings, calling it sieve-like because olfactory nerves pass through its perforated plate into the brain. That plate carries its own sieve name: Latin cribriform, from cribrum, another word for sieve.

Galen wrote in Greek, but his works were transmitted through Arabic medicine before returning to Latin Europe. Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809-873), the principal translator at Baghdad's House of Wisdom, rendered Galen's anatomical descriptions into Arabic, preserving the sieve-bone concept intact. European translators in Toledo and Salerno carried those Arabic texts back into Latin during the twelfth century, keeping the ethmoid's identity as a perforated bone. The word followed the same path as Greek geometry, philosophy, and medicine: east to Baghdad, west to Italy.

When Vesalius dissected skulls at Padua, he confirmed Galen's description and kept the name. The ethmoid's perforations were easy to see: the cribriform plate, pocked with small holes, allowed the olfactory nerves to travel from nose to brain. Vesalius also noted the bone's contribution to the orbit of the eye and the walls of the nasal cavity. He published precise illustrations in 1543, and the word ethmoid was fixed in European anatomical practice.

The ethmoid is one of the bones forming the nasal cavity walls. Surgeons who perform endoscopic sinus surgery work inside and around the ethmoid, navigating a honeycomb of air cells that drain into the nasal passages. The cribriform plate is the thinnest bone in the skull, vulnerable to fracture and to the entry of infection into the brain. Greek sieve-makers would not have recognized their household tool in this fragile bone, but the name they gave to straining still holds.