Page 253 - ירושלים: גיליון רפואי

Dr Aaron Meir Masie
A Physician Known for His Nouns

Smadar Barak

“Banquets, parties for no reason, interviews, conversations […] speeches and more speeches,
never-ending, […] a malignant disease that has attacked all of America (God help us!). It
would be worthwhile for our friend, Dr Masie, to find a name for this illness and record it in
his notebook; I already know what the name would be: na’emet […]." In his usual manner,
proposed Bialik, a friend of Dr Masie, and for good reason.

Dr Aaron Masie (1858–1930), a physician who was known for his expertise and treated the
residents of Jerusalem in his private clinic and in Bikur Holim Hospital from 1902 until the
day he died, was also a Hebrew linguist and a member of the Hebrew Language Committee,
as well as its president. Masie was imbued with a Zionist consciousness and the belief of
the importance of Hebrew in the revival of the Jewish nation in its homeland; he sought to
increase the scientific vocabulary in the Hebrew language and especially to enrich the use
of medical terms. He even worked on compiling a thick medical dictionary, but the book,
Hebrew Dictionary of Medicine and Natural Science, was only completed after his death, and
edited by the physician and poet Shaul Tchernichovsky.

At the same time that he was healing patients with illnesses which were prevalent at the
beginning of the twentieth century, Dr Masie worked on determining the Hebrew names for
those afflictions. He often formed them based on a pattern such as dalleket, using descriptive
words of diseases and afflictions from the Bible.

Upon his arrival in Eretz Israel in 1888, he worked under the auspices of Baron Rothschild as a
physician in the settlement of Rishon Le’Zion and the surrounding area; immediately following
his arrival, he coined the Hebrew word for rabies (kallevet from kelev for dog) because dogs and
other animals were the principal carriers of the disease. It is said that Masie was so excited over
his innovation that he went by foot from the settlement to Jerusalem in order to inform his
scholarly friends. Among them was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who sought Masie’s advice whenever
he proposed scientific words in Hebrew.

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