My name is Anna Wiley and I am a graduate of Xavier University, Class of 2013. I majored in Classical langauages, and minored in philosophy and natural science in order to take the prerequisites for medical school. I am currently a second year medical student at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

Studying Latin and Greek taught me how to intimately interact with material. In literary translation, it is never enough to know the definition of a word; one must know how it works in the sentence and think about why it was chosen and placed in that location. This type of deeper understanding carried over into my study of other disciplines and allowed me to be successful in the sciences. Studying these languages also requires analytical thinking, to be able to pull from a set of fixed knowledge and synthesize a new translation. Languages train your mind to many variables at once, to determine how they fit together. This same process is utilized in medicine, putting together symptoms to create a differential diagnosis and then be continually thinking ahead in management and treatment. Even more concretely, the study of Latin and Greek is invaluable in the study of anatomy and pathology. While my classmates struggle to remember what things like “torticollis” or “prosopagnosia” mean, I can quickly dissect the terms and move on to the pathophysiology of these conditions.