Where does iatrogenic come from?

The first records of iatrogenic in English come from the 1920s. It comes from the Greek iatro–, referring to a healer, and –genic, meaning “produced or caused by.” So, iatrogenic conditions are caused by the person who’s supposed to be healing you.

When doctors take the Hippocratic oath, they promise to “first, do no harm.” This means that whatever they do to treat patients, they should never make things worse. But practicing medicine is complex, and there are many ways that things can go wrong in the course of treatment, especially when mistakes are made. Iatrogenic conditions can result from many different situations. The vast majority of them are unintentional, but some of them do happen because of negligence. For example, iatrogenic injuries sometimes result from surgeries performed on the wrong part of the body. Other times, though, iatrogenic conditions happen when everything goes according to plan—a scar resulting from surgery can be described as iatrogenic since it happened in the course of a medical procedure.

The term is sometimes extended beyond the medical field to refer to problems caused by actions intended to be solutions. For example, a volunteer program that results in negative relationships with a community could be described as iatrogenic.