So when they were deciding on medical abbreviations they decided to use a language nobody speaks anymore? That is brilliant.
These aren’t a recent invention. This reference traces the use back to at least the 1400s.
Nobody “decided on” medical abbreviations. There is no master list or official list. There is a list of abbreviations you’re not supposed to use if you work for a JCAHO accredited hospital, and individual hospitals or practices may have their lists of official or suggested abbreviations for use by their staff, but there’s no master list used by all physicians.
Physicians use a lot of Latin and Latin derived terms. It’s actually useful that it’s a “dead” language, because that means it’s not changing. Per os means by mouth, and always will. No worries that this week it’s slang for on your forehead, or that next decade it will mean by nose. Again, I don’t know that anyone “decided on” using Latin, except that it was once the language used in colleges, and that included medical training.
I know at one point, German was very widely used in medicine outside of Germany, and there’s the occasional term here or there to remind us: EKG is sometimes used in writing, and ECG is pronounced “Ee-kay-gee”, because in German the test is an Elektrokardiogramm. In English it’s electrocardiogram. We keep that pronunciation of the K in English, even when we write it out as ECG, because to call it “Ee-see-gee” risks confusing it with an EEG, a totally different test.
Isn’t that clear as mud?