Cancer (from Latin; sometimes known by the transliteration Carcinos, from original Greek Καρκίνος: Karkinos) or, simply the Crab, is a giant crab in Greek mythology that inhabited the lagoon of Lerna.[1] He is a secondary character in the myth of the twelve labors of Heracles, who attacks Heracles on Hera‘s orders, while Heracles is in the midst
of fighting the Hydra of Lerna.[2]
Heracles kills the Crab, who is rewarded for his efforts by Hera turning him into the constellation of Cancer.[3] Since it is not a main element of the myth, it does
not always appear in the versions that have reached the present day; nevertheless, classic mythographers, astronomers, historians or philosophers such as Plato, the Pseudo-Eratosthenes, the Pseudo-Apollodorus and Hyginus mention the character in their texts.
One of the most common interpretations of the myth associates it with a 22nd century B.C. battle in the Peloponnese, which resulted in the destruction of Lerna (Minoan-influenced) by pre-Mycenaean peoples[4]
In art, Carcinos is often depicted as a detail of the myth of the Hydra or as
an image of the Zodiac sign and the constellation to which it gives its name.
Etymology[edit]
The name “Carcinos” is a transliteration of the Ancient Greek word Καρκίνος,[5] which literally means “crab”.[6] This is why, according to the version and translation of the myth, the character is not referred to by his original name but only as a giant crab, the Crab or Cancer.[7]
“Cancer” is the translation of the word carcinos into Latin, made by Aulus Cornelius Celsus and collected in his work De medicina. The Greek term had been used since Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.) to denote certain types of tumors,[8] because of the resemblance that the Greek physician observed between the lesions and
the shape of a crab.
Celsus continued to use the analogy and introduced the term that has endured
to the present day to denote that group of diseases.[9] The word Καρκίνος is still
used in the Greek language today for several of the meanings of the word cancer.
Other words such as “carcinoma” (also used by Hippocrates), “carcinogen” or “carcinology” share the original Greek root, in reference to both the crustaceans
and the disease.
A Karkinos (KAHR-kee-nohs; Anc. Gr. Καρκινος “Cancer”) is a giant crab-like Wesen that was seen in a Grimm diary in “Map of the Seven Knights“.
Characteristics
When woged, Karkinos’ hands turn into powerful claws, and their skin becomes an armored crab-like carapace. They were immortalized by the Greeks when one of them famously fought Hercules.
Excerpt from Grimm Diaries
I was on a trade ship bound for Alexandria when suddenly a fierce storm turned
the sea… Gathered upon the rocks of a small… It was providence that had kept me alive. Grace was not upon the crew. I am wounded, my body wretched with pain,
though God gave me breath to experience it. A figured hun… out of the…
It surveyed the scene… for salvage but still one who came.
Before I raised my hand to signal him, another figure followed the first, then another, until at least ten moving to the flotsam of the… Later, I realized their sinister designs.
The beasts bent over them and the creatures resembled crabs as men with fearsome claws and unspeakable evil. They savaged the corpses of the crew, greedily eating
flesh and crushing bone. Summoning my last breaths I stood, grasped a statue in a shattered boat and wielded it as a club.
The Karkinos are scavengers akin to all those that feed on opportunities…
cowards. I shattered three of them before a number fled inland. The sound of battle
attracted local hunters who took me in. It was with the… the name of these beasts.
In gratitude for helping I stayed on the Island until I was certain every member
of the Karakinos… to the sword.
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2. 77 – 80
(trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
“For his second labour Herakles (Heracles) was instructed to
slay the Hydra Lernaia (Lernaean). The beast was nurtured in the marshes of Lerna . . .
[Herakles attacked her and] she hung on to him by wrapping herself round one of his feet, and he was unable to help matters by striking her with his club, for as soon as one head was pounded off two others would grow in its place. Then a giant crab (karkinos) came along to help the Hydra, and bit Herakles on the foot. For this he killed the crab.”
Plato, Euthydemus 297c (trans. Lamb) (Greek philosopher C4th B.C.) :
“[Plato uses the myth of the Hydra as a metaphor for urgument :] Herakles, who was no match for the Hydra . . . who was so clever that she sent forth many heads . . . in place of each one that was cut off; . . . [and a] crab . . . from the sea–freshly, I fancy, arrived on shore; and, when the hero was so bothered with its leftward barks and bites,
he summoned his nephew Iolaus to the rescue, and he brought him effective relief.”
Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 23 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
“Cancer. The Crab is said to have been put among the stars by the favour of Juno [Hera], because, when Hercules [Heracles] had stood firm against the Lernaean Hydra, it had snapped at his foot from the swamp. Hercules, enraged at this, had killed it, and Juno [Hera] put it among the constellations.”
Cancer Genetics What is cancer From Greek karkinos (slidetodoc.com)
Instant Crabification: Why Evolution Keeps Coming Up Crustacean
By Helen LinLast Updated May 27, 2021
Plenty of interesting things took place during the pandemic lockdown of 2020.
With everyone stuck at home, attention wandering aimlessly, it was only natural that many of us would revert to scrolling around online. It was during this mass instance of random swiping when a Twitter post gained steam and the internet collectively discovered an evolutionary process called carcinization.
According to Know Your Meme, it was around October of 2020 that carcinization memes began appearing in full force as a common search result. And the memes that a quick Google search delivers depict the strange scientific process that describes how various creatures seemingly turn into crabs over time. But is carcinization real, or is it just meme fodder? Let’s take a closer look into the process and its biological implications.
What Is Carcinization?
So what exactly is carcinization, and why did it become the focus of so many internet users in 2020? If memes are to be believed, it’s the idea that everything, from internet routers to other memes, eventually evolves into a crab. But memes often come with a hefty dose of hyperbole, and the idea that every creature on Earth is destined to eventually resemble a Dungeness from the depths is a pretty hefty exaggeration.
Photo Courtesy: One of many carcinization memes that began appearing online
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Microsoft Word – ãÑÖ ÇáÓÑØÇä ãä ãäÙæÑ ØÈí – ÇÌÊãÇÚí.doc (iasj.net)
Carcinization is an actual evolutionary process, however, and it involves crustaceans specifically. Scientists have documented ample instances in which previously un-crab-like crustaceans have evolved into far more crab-like forms, and their process of doing so is called carcinization. (“Carcin” comes from the Greek “karkinos,” which means “crab” and is also the origin of the zodiac sign Cancer.) This isn’t a recent development in the scientific community, either; the term “carcinization” was first coined by zoologist Lancelot Alexander Borradaile in 1916. Researchers have been observing carcinization taking place for over a century.
In 2017, several academics performed a scientific study on the subject and published
their findings in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. The study discussed five documented instances in which creatures that started out as something else all managed to evolve to display much more crab-like forms. A 2020 tweet from a user who’d just discovered this research ended up going viral. The internet latched on and began creating jokes, and the rest is meme history — much like the creatures that gradually turned into crabs.
Not All Crabs Are Created Equal
Before we go any further, it’s important to define exactly what “crab” means, at least in scientific terms. The answer sounds like it should be obvious, right? Well, not exactly.
As it turns out, science is far pickier about naming conventions and descriptions than many of us might imagine.
Unidentified Man: The alphabet has only 26 letters.
With these 26 magic symbols, however, millions of words are written every day.
Around 400 B.C., Hippocrates is said to have named masses of cancerous cells karkinos — Greek for crab. Science and medical historian Howard Markel discusses a few hypotheses on why Hippocrates named the disease after a crab, and how well cancer was understood in the ancient world.
IRA FLATOW, host: And that means it’s time for that little jingle,
time for our episode of Science Diction on SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.
I’m Ira Flatow, and we’re going to be talking with Howard Markel. Hi, Howard.
Dr. HOWARD MARKEL (History of Medicine, University of Michigan):
Hi, Ira. Good afternoon.
FLATOW: We always talk about Howard, every week about the origin of scientific words.
This month, Howard, what kind of word do you have for us today?
Dr. MARKEL: Well, keeping with the theme of scary things, it’s the word that was –
it was and remained scary to a lot of people, the C word, cancer.
FLATOW: Hmm. Well, wow. Yeah. Well, I know it’s a constellation, right?
Has anything to do with that?
Dr. MARKEL: Well, it is a constellation. But before that, it was and is a crab. And, you know, when you’re starting with medical origins, it’s a good bet to start with Hippocrates because he was around very early. And some time about 400 B.C., he was examining many cancer patients with what we’d call today end-stage cancer.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm.
Dr. MARKEL: And he applied the Greek word karkinos, which means crab. A lot of explanations, all of them equally wonderful and all of them equally difficult to prove, but why did he use that? And if you examine a tumor, if you actually feel a malignant tumor, you’ll note that it’s hard as a rock. And so some have explained that it reminded him of the hard shell of a crab. But others have said it may remind him of – may have reminded him of the pain that a malignant tumor induces. It’s much like the sharp pinch of a crab’s claw. And an even better version is that it suggests the tenacity with which, you know, a crab bites you…
FLATOW: Right. Right.
Dr. MARKEL: …and refuses to let go. And that reminded Hippocrates and other doctors how stubborn these things were to remove.
FLATOW: I got you. We’re talking about word origins on SCIENCE Friday from NPR.
I’m Ira Flatow, talking with Howard Markel. And so you have those three main definitions…
Dr. MARKEL: Right.
FLATOW: …of how they originated.
Dr. MARKEL: Yeah. And then later on, you know – now, Hippocrates, of course, thought tumors were – malignant tumors were caused by something else, an overabundance of black bile, which by the way, doctors for the next thousands (unintelligible) did that.
But he was seeing a lot of tumors, as per other doctors of the ancient world, that were malignant. You know, breast and uterine, mouth, skin cancer and so on. And their best advice to those people was to tell them, basically, to go home and die.
FLATOW: Hmm.
Dr. MARKEL: About 47 A.D., however, the Greco-Roman philosopher Celsus – he was not a doctor, but he wrote a very important encyclopedia of medicine – he named it cancer, because that’s the Latin equivalent of crab and so the word remains to this day. And then about 100 years later, another very famous doctor named Galen extended that Hippocratic metaphor even further. He was dissecting a breast tumor. He noticed all the veins and tributaries of malignancy around that mass, and he said it looks just like a crab’s legs extending outward from every part of its body.And so the term really stuck. Even though doctors for many hundreds of years didn’t really know what caused it or to distinguish it from many other diseases that also had oozing, non-healing sores and things like that.
FLATOW: Hmm. Now, there’s a word related to cancer and of course, it’s oncology.
Dr. MARKEL: Right. In fact, we called doctors to this day, oncologists.
And that’s another Hippocratic term onkos, is a Greek word, and it simply means masses.
The – I think that’s probably a lot better word than cancerologist. (Soundbite of laughter)
FLATOW: Yeah.
Dr. MARKEL: And that stuck, as well.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And just speaking of how people used to talk about cancers,
I remember from way back, people were actually afraid to use the C word.
Dr. MARKEL: Absolutely. I mean, I remember as a boy, when family members had cancer, they would often – adults would whisper it or call it the
C word. And, you know, that’s a wonderful change over time piece of evidence. There is that for, you know, thousands of years, cancer was a death sentence for those who were unfortunate enough to get it. And now, as time has moved on and we’ve gotten so much better, not only at diagnosing and distinguishing it, but treating it – and there’s hundreds of forms of cancer – it’s no longer that death sentence. In fact, there are many, you know, millions of people who have survived cancer. So it’s become something that we can talk about more openly…
FLATOW: Hmm.
Dr. MARKEL: …even though it’s still around the crabby word.
FLATOW: Yeah. In those mysterious days, where did people think cancers came from? How did you get cancer?
Dr. MARKEL: Well, that’s just a host of things. You know, the imbalance of the four humors in antiquity. Some people in the middle ages in the Renaissance Period thought it was for the sins they committed against their god, that they somehow deserved it. By the 1850s, pathologists started looking at tumor cells. You know, we talked about the origin of the word cell a few weeks ago. And they were looking at cancer cells and they were fascinated by the fact that they proliferate uncontrollably and they destroy healthy tissue and spread. And so we started thinking about cellular mechanisms, beginning in the 1850s, 1860s, but it reached its zenith in the last 10 or 20 years.
And we can only expect better and better information…
FLATOW: All right.
Dr. MARKEL: …as time goes on.
FLATOW: Howard, thank you very much as always. We’ll see you next month.
Dr. MARKEL: Okay. Have a good weekend, Ira.
FLATOW: You too. Howard Markel is professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and director of the Center for the History of Medicine there. Copyright © 2010 NPR. All rights reserved.
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Listen to this Article at: Science Diction: The Origin Of The Word ‘Cancer’ : NPR
Karkinos Healthcare seeks to democratize cancer care, while enabling communities towards cancer prevention and early detection under the aegis of its Distributed Cancer Care Network. This ensures that no patient is left out of the cancer care continuum for lack of access or affordability. In the process, the Command Center plays the role of a central entity of this network, by facilitating centralized quality control and coordination of care mechanisms in patient navigation. “Technology will play a significant role in reducing numbers of new cancer cases and deaths” (biospectrumindia.com)
Transitioning from Reactive to Proactive cancer care based on robust, evidence-based histopathology diagnosis – Karkinos Healthcare This short video showcases the fundamental steps of Karkinos Healthcare on its journey towards shaping
the cancer care ecosystem in India.
Karkinos Healthcare – Shaping Community-Centered Cancer Care in India
through Command Center & DCCN – YouTube
Physics — the crux to finding new cancer therapies – Karkinos Healthcare
k-Vani – Karkinos Healthcare | Karkinos Healthcare – YouTube
karakinos: cancer is crablike – Search (bing.com)