This is Origins in Five. Five minutes, one word, a small story to start the day. Today's word is influenza. Many of you may not think of this word so formally, but rather call it the flu. And later in the episode we'll talk about why we call it the flu. Regardless of how you refer to it, you want to avoid getting it. Symptoms include an aching body, the chills, a fever. The list goes on. People do all sorts of things to avoid it. Take a flu shot, use excessive amounts of hand sanitizer, try to avoid people in the winter, and yet, every year, people get it. It is a way of just showing up. We know a lot about influenza now, but did you know that the name we gave this illness came not from a doctor, not from a laboratory, not from science at all, but from the stars. So let's trace the history. The word influenza comes from Medieval Latin. In fact, it started there, moved to Italian, and ultimately English. In medieval Latin, the word was influentia, which meant influence. But in the medieval world, influence carried a very specific and very literal meaning. To understand the relationship between the Latin word influentia and the stars, we need to go back in history a bit. In the second century there was an individual named Galen, who is a Greek physician and philosopher in the Roman Empire. He was well known and his theories and insights influenced Western medicine for years after his death. He served as a personal doctor to emperors like Marcus Aurelius. Galen believed that the body contained four important liquids called humors, which were phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile. These liquids had to remain in balance or else a human would become ill. So knowing that, let's fast forward to the Middle Ages. Scholars during this time believed in an invisible fluid given off by the stars and planets, a kind of cosmic force that flowed down from the heavens and shaped events on Earth. The word influentia itself came from the Latin influere to flow in. The celestial fluid they believed could affect the weather, the crops, the fate of kingdoms, and of course, the four liquid called humours in a human being. So when disease swept through a population striking thousands of people at once, medieval Italians had an explanation at the ready. The stars were to blame. The planets had aligned some bad configuration, and their influence was flowing down into the bodies of the sick. They called these outbreaks influenza, a flowing in of something from above. The word was used in Italian for diseases at least as early as the 1500s, but it was a very specific outbreak that carried the word into the general English consciousness. In 1743, an epidemic began in Rome and spread across much of Europe. English journalists and physicians scrambling to describe and name what was happening, and in that scramble they borrow the Italian word directly. In fact, a report in the Gentleman's Magazine from April 1743 noted, and I quote, an article from Rome informs us that a sort of plague has broke out there, which destroys abundance of their people, and they call it the influenza. And the name stuck. Even as the explanation behind it crumbled, in the next 150 years scientists had identified viruses. The stars were off the hook, but the word they had inspired remained. Now the shortened form flu appeared first in the mid 1800s. It's an unusual way to shorten a word. You cut out the beginning, you cut out the end, and you just leave the middle. But it caught on. It may be due to the fact that we stress the middle syllable when we say the word influenza, and while unusual, it isn't unprecedented. For example, the word prescription is sometimes shortened to script, thus keeping the middle syllable. At any rate, influenza is an interesting word. Humans needed something to blame for the illness, so they blamed the stars. But even when the stars were let off the hook, the word survived. And that's Origins and Five. One word, one story to start your day.