Most of our body parts and organs were named a long time ago, in some cases a very long time ago even before our era. It was then natural to use Greek and Latin (Roman) naming. This way of naming became and still is the current tradition. Newly discovered organs, organ parts, plants and animals are all, even nowadays, given a Latin name. In short, it can be said that the Latin-Greek nomenclature dominates the medical-technical language.
The naming of organs and organ parts is largely based on similarities with objects and phenomena in the surrounding world as well as in terms of size, location and position. It is therefore much easier to learn the names and understand them if you know a little Latin and Greek, which only a few know nowadays.
It is against this background that an attempt has been made on this website to present the various names in Swedish together with the accepted medical-technical designations. In some cases, this is not a problem as there is already a common Swedish term. But some direct translations into Swedish give such a contrived expression that the medical-cartoon name is left standing.
If you look over the names that belong in the nervous system, you will find remarkably many of this kind:
bark (cortex)
tribe (truncus)
branch (dendrite)
root (radix)
nucleus
Tuber (bulbus)
marrow (medulla)
all of which are more or less linked to the plant kingdom and botany. The background is that most natural scientists of earlier eras were solidly trained in botany because zoology, not to mention human anatomy, was far less known, and in some eras forbidden field of study. It was therefore natural to use names and "images" from the plant world.
Take, for example, the concept of nucleus with regard to the CNS. Here one can imagine how the "ancients" when they cut open the brain stem "saw" a white pulp with embedded darker kernels (cf. apple, cucumber). It is also easy to understand that the grey surface layer of the large brain became the cortex of the brain, and that the bundles of wire that emanated from the spinal cord became "roots".