Is there an etymological link between medicine and the ancient greek μειδησεν (μειδαω) meaning laugh or smile? [closed]

Is there an etymological link between medicine and the Ancient Greek μειδησεν (μειδαω) meaning laugh or smile (as seen in Book 1 of the Iliad)?

I hope this is the correct place to ask this. I wondered if there was a link due to the phrase "laughter is the best medicine". I also wondered if linked to the belief in Ancient Greece (eg, at Epidaurus Theatre) that laughter and theatre had an effect on well-being and health (there was a healing centre next to the theatre).

I've looked briefly at various websites, most of whom mention the Latin origin, but I was interested in seeing whether there might be a different route anyone knew of.

No, there is no link.

There are three main aspects to this, and all three of them agree fairly conclusively that there is precious little possibility that Greek μείδησεν has anything to do with medicine through the proverb ‘laughter is the best medicine’: there’s the well-established Latin origin of the word medicine, the Greek verb μείδησεν itself, and the English proverb.

The Latin origin

As Josh’s answer states, it is well-established that the word medicine comes to us through French from Latin, based ultimately on the verb medeor, which in Latin means only ‘heal, cure, remedy, amend, correct, relieve’.

Further back, that verb comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *med-, which originally meant ‘measure, limit, consider, weight out, etc.’. Its meaning represents a semantic shift in that root which was specific to the Italic languages, however. The Greek cognates to the Latin verb (active μέδω and middle μέδομαι), thus mean, respectively, “protect, rule over” (representing a semantic shift specific to Greek) and “provide for, think on, be mindful of, bethink one of”.

Of the Latin verb, de Vaan says:

The meaning of medeor is based on a semantic shift from ‘measure’ to ‘distribute a cure, heal’. For a PIE stative verb (as assumed by LIV) or a frequentative, the e-grade in med- would be surprising. If the intermediate phase was ‘to judge’ (cf. meditor), medeor and its e-grade may have been grafted on the noun *medo(s)- ‘judgement, law’ (> modus) seen in U[mbrian] meřs, mers ‘law’. We can then regard it as a stative verb *med-ē- ‘to be a judge’ > ‘to be a healer, to heal’ which was formed within Italic.

The three essential things to note here are:

that this sense of the base verb and its form were formed within the Italic branch of Indo-European languages;
that the same root is attested in Greek with a different meaning—and also a different form to the verb μειδάω;
that the phonemic/phonetic form of the word ‘medicine’ in English, /ˈmεd(i̵)sɪn/, is somewhat coincidental and bears no relation to its Latin forebearer. Medicus, the immediate ancestor, would be /ˈmedikus/ with a /k/ sound, like medical rather than medicine. The change from /k/ to /s/ did not happen until some time in Vulgar Latin, around a thousand years after the Iliad was en vogue. And of course the derivational base of Latin medicus is a verb that doesn’t have any consonant there at all: the consonant is part of the adjectivising suffix, not the root. So the only thing left in common with the English word medicine is the stem med-.

The Greek verb

The verb form you’re asking about here, μείδησεν, does not really mean “laugh or smile” as such, but rather “he/she/it smiled”: it is the third person singular aorist form of the verb μειδάω ‘smile’. Moreover, it’s an extended variant of that form: the base form is μείδησε, without the ephelcystic nu, which gets rid of the n in medicine. Get rid of the further conditioning that this in an inflected aorist form (which very rarely form the basis for creating nouns), and you also lose the /s/, since that is the aorist marker. You then, again, have only a verbal root in common, this time meid-.

Of course, that immediately raises the problem that meid- and med- are not the same thing: both English and Greek (and Latin, for that matter) have both, and they are not interchangeable. Greek words with -ei- do not normally end up yielding English /ε/ (that is, a short ‘eh’ sound).

Even if that weren’t enough to reject the theory, however, there is the fact that the Greek verb μειδάω also has quite a satisfactory etymology: it is one of several extensions to the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)mei̯h₂-, whose base meaning is quite simply ‘smile, be glad, laugh, be mirthful’. The extension that has survived in Greek here has a *-d-, while others have an *-r- or an *-l-.

The reason the Greek verb begins with an m is quite simply that initial *sm- regularly loses its *s; the same happens with *sn-, which becomes just *n-.¹ The same root is also behind the Latin adjective mīrus (with the *-r- extension) and its derivatives (including words like miracle and admire): Latin underwent the same simplification of the initial cluster as Greek did. (The meaning of mīrus ‘wonderful, marvellous, amazing’ represents another semantic shift that only happened within the Italic languages, or perhaps just within Latin itself.)

In contrast, the Germanic languages were quite happy to keep *sm- unchanged, and the *smei̯h₂- root also shows up as verbs here, indeed with both *-r- and *-l- extensions. The modern English forms of those verbs are smirk and smile.

So with all that, the only part of medicine and μείδησεν that ends up being actually comparable is the m and the d. Not much, especially when you consider that both the proposed ancestors here—viz., Latin medeor and Greek μειδάω—have cognates in the opposite language that don’t fit the form.

The English proverb

Finally, there is the question of the proverb that “laughter is the best medicine”. While I don’t think anyone knows for sure how old that particular turn of phrase is, it seems unlikely that it is as old as the Iliad.

Proverbs 17:22 states that:

A cheerful heart is good medicine,
but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.

– which is rather close to being the same sentiment. But it still seems fairly far-fetched as links go—especially when you consider that, as far as I can figure out, the classical Greek translation of that particular place used an entirely different word (my emphasis):

καρδία εὐφραινομένη εὐεκτεῖν ποιεῖ,
ἀνδρὸς δὲ λυπηροῦ ξηραίνεται τὰ ὀστᾶ.

The verb used for being cheerful here is εὐφραίνω ‘cheer, make glad, be merry’; and the word loosely translatable as ‘medicine’ is εὐεκτεῖν ποιέω, which literally means ‘cause to be in a good condition’. So the Greek version really says, “A cheerful heart makes you in good condition”, which is a fair distance from ‘laughter is the best medicine’.

Notes:

If we’re being precise, the initial s in this root is a so-called s-mobile, which means that even in Proto-Indo-European itself there seems to have been some vacillation between whether it was there or not. It showed up in some dialects/forms/cases/contexts, but not in others. That isn’t particularly important in this case, though, since we’re mostly dealing with two languages where it would have been lost anyway. There is at least some indirect evidence that both Greek and Latin did have the *s in this root originally:
- If it is correct that the word cosmis on the Duenos inscription is the same word, with the same meaning, as Classical Latin cōmis ‘kind, gracious, affable, elegant’, and that it represents an earlier *kom-smi- ‘who has a smile’, then the Early Latin form shows there was an original s there.
- If the Epic Greek form φιλομμειδής is an actual, historically justifiable form (rather than just a spurious variant to make it fit the metre by doubling the consonant), then it almost certainly represents *filo-hmeidā́s from earlier *filo-smeid-ā́s, with the (in the compound not) initial *s.

According to Etymonline the origin is from the PIE root "med" measure, consider, advice, from which also the Greek medomani meaning "be mindful of":

c. 1200, "medical treatment, cure, remedy," also used figuratively, of spiritual remedies, from Old French medecine (Modern French médicine) "medicine, art of healing, cure, treatment, potion," from Latin medicina "the healing art, medicine; a remedy," also used figuratively, perhaps originally ars medicina "the medical art," from fem. of medicinus (adj.) "of a doctor," from medicus "a physician" (see medical (adj.)); though OED finds evidence for this is wanting. Meaning "a medicinal potion or plaster" in English is mid-14c.

Medical:

from Latin medicus "physician, surgeon, medical man" (n.); "healing, madicinal" (adj.), from mederi "to heal, give medical attention to, cure," originally "know the best course for," *from an early specialization of the PIE root med- "to measure, limit, consider, advise, take appropriate measures" (source also of Greek medomai "be mindful of," medein "to rule;" Avestan vi-mad- "physician;"