A strange question, to be sure, but one that may prove important to children in Africa suffering from noma, or cancrum oris. I quote, however, from the opening lines of Dalrymple’s piece at Pajamas Media:
When doctors knew nothing and could do even less (if actively harming patients with their treatment counts as doing less than nothing), they hid their ignorance and therapeutic impotence by the use of impressive-sounding Latin terminology. Even when they spoke in the vernacular they did their best to be incomprehensible, and generally succeeded. Portentousness was then a substitute for prowess.
Doctors are still inclined to use impressive-sounding words for the same purpose: or at any rate, so their critics say. Idiopathic is a learned way of saying that the cause of a disease is unknown; and when a disease is said to be multifactorial in causation, it is an implicit avowal of ignorance: for diseases should at least have necessary causes if doctors can claim to understand them.