I came across this word in a review of a book on cancer, but can't find its meaning. What is it?

Chirurgical

It's an archaic form of surgical from the Greek for 'handicraft' kheiros 'hand' + ourgia 'work' (link).

OneLook.

quote:

Originally posted by Asa Lovejoy:
I came across this word in a review of a book on cancer, but can't find its meaning. What is it?

zmj is right as usual. Many British Medical Schools still confer the double degree of MB.ChB., upon their graduates, i.e. Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery. The Ch is abbreviated from the French, chirugie .
A year or two before, Coronis became pregnant with Asclepius by Apollo but fell in love with Ischys, son of Elatus. A crow informed Apollo of the affair and he sent his sister, Artemis, to kill Coronis. Her body was burned on a funeral pyre, staining the white feathers of the crows black. Apollo rescued the baby by performing the first (later named) Caesarean section and gave it to the centaur Cheiron who named him Aesculapius and taught him the art of medicine surgery.
Cheiron is I think the earliest root of chirugie, later to become surgery.
Belated afterthought after appropriate reference:

Chirugery, an archaic word, originates (OED) In ME. a. OF. cirurgerie, f. stem of cirurg-ien, cirurg-ie + -erie, -ERY. After the Renascence altered, with the cognate words, to chir-.] 
The OED states:
The Greek - combining form of hand, appearing in Greek in a very large number of words; several of these were adopted in Latin with the spelling chiro-, e.g. chrographum, chromantia, chronomia, chrothca, chrrgia, and have thus passed into the modern langs.; many more have been taken by these directly from Greek, e.g. chirocracy, chiroscopy, chirosophy, chirotechny, or formed from Greek elements and on Greek analogies, as chiropodist, chirosopher. In modern technical terms, esp. those of botany and zoology, the spelling is often cheir-, e.g. cheiranthus, cheiroptera, cheirotherium. 
  In words thoroughly naturalized in Latin, CH was treated as C, and had in Romanic the phonetic history of c before i: hence such medL. forms as cirographum, cirogryllus, cirotheca, ciromancia, cirurgianus, also written cyro-, and It. and OF. and Eng. forms in ciro-, cyro-. But, in most words, modern scholarship has restored the ch- spelling and k pronunciation: see however CHIRURGEON, SURGEON.

Strangely, there is a CHEIRON: International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences! Or am I missing something?

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By the way, a note on pronunciation of the shorter form chirurgeon: the initial sound is a k (not a ch), and the word has three syllables (not two, like sureon), with the accent on the second.

quote:

Originally posted by zmježd:
Chirurgical: It's an archaic form of surgical

That's certainly an accurate reading of your link, z; in effect you're saying that our c-version is the parent of our s-version.

However, OED (as I read it) indicates a slighly different relationship, sort of a "cousinly" one: Each word came separately, from Old French. Originally Old French had the c-form cirurgien (similarly in Spanish and Portuguese), which gave us our c-form, in Middle English. Later, Old French changed to an s-form, from which we took our s-form.

You're right, shu. The Middle English cirurgien was borrowed from Old French, and Middle English surgien was borrowed from Norman which inherited it from Old French cirurgien. The Old French version would have been pronounced with an initial s. The Latin c /k/ changed to /s/ in certain environments. The spelling, in English, with an initial ch is based on etymology, and not on how the word was pronounced in Middle English. (A similar etymological spelling which influenced the pronunciation is perfect from Middle English parfit and in Present-Day English the t in often. So, it's not really an archaic form as a parallel one.

But in fairness to you, zmj, note that AHD had it wrong.

I don't think the AHD has it wrong.

quote:

Middle English surgerie, from Old French, short for cirurgerie, from cirurgie, from Latin chīrūga...

This is a derivation of "surgery". It has nothing to say about the origin of "chirugery".

...unless you're referring to how it says "Old French" when it should say "Norman"?

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