Belen Deniz
Ankara Numune Education and Research Hospital, Department of Neurosurgery, Ankara, Turkey.
Turk Neurosurg. 2018;28(3):490-494. doi: 10.5137/1019-5149.JTN.20821-17.0.
In the medical literature, various ethnic terms such as Caucasian or Mongolian,are sporadically cited to indicate the relationship between certain disorders and the geographical origin of individuals. Few scientists recognize that those definitions stem from a medical thesis written by the German physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1775. Through considering cranial shapes, Blumenbach proposed five race varieties including the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Malayan, the Ethiopian, and the American. While he favored only beauty, his contemporaries reclaimed an intellectuality arrangement among those race types and gave the highest credibility to Caucasian, which therefore, besides defining an ethnicity, has conveyed a discriminatory meaning. The term had been widely used in the medical literature without knowledge of its historical background. Although not commonly used any longer, the Caucasian and similar terms that reflect racial preference should be abandoned in medical text and replaced by more favorable definitions.
在医学文献中，诸如白种人或蒙古人种等各种种族术语偶尔会被引用，以表明某些疾病与个体地理起源之间的关系。很少有科学家意识到这些定义源于德国医生约翰·弗里德里希·布卢门巴赫于1775年撰写的一篇医学论文。通过考虑颅骨形状，布卢门巴赫提出了五个种族变种，包括白种人、蒙古人种、马来人种、埃塞俄比亚人种和美洲人种。虽然他只看重美貌，但他的同时代人在这些种族类型中重新进行了智力排序，并给予白种人最高的可信度，因此，这个词除了定义一个种族外，还传达了一种歧视性的含义。这个术语在医学文献中被广泛使用，却无人了解其历史背景。虽然现在已不常用，但反映种族偏好的白种人及类似术语应在医学文本中摒弃，代之以更合适的定义。
