Oncology: etymology of the term.

The OED lists oncologia (a Latinization of Greek ογκολογία, ὄγκος + λόγια) as a dictionary term attested from 1860. The neoclassical term is much older, however. The neo-Greek term was used in the title of two seventeenth-century medical tracts on assorted tumors, first in a 1618 medical dissertation by Balthasar Simon. "Oncology" was more definitively established in Rudolf Virchow's Die krankhaften Geschwülste, a 1862/3 lecture series and trilogy on the subject.