Hold one picture: a cold wet morning, and a hand that will not open easily. The joint is swollen, the muscle is stiff, and every movement has to be started slowly. That one illness, rheumatism, is the centre of the whole word. Everything rheumatic is a way of pointing back at it: the pain it makes, the diseases in its family, the person who lives with it, and in older writing, a whole ward of such people.
From the word’s history
Our Wiktionary evidence traces rheumatic through Middle French rheumatique and Latin rheumaticus to Ancient Greek rheuma, a stream or flow, from rheo, to flow. One way to hold that: something in the body was pictured as flowing down and settling in a joint, and the aching that followed took the name of the flow.
手上的 Wiktionary 資料把 rheumatic 一路追到古希臘文 ῥεῦμα（rheuma），意思是「水流、流動」，再往前是 ῥέω「流」。一種想法是：身體裡有東西流下來，積在關節，人就開始痛。那個「流」的名字，後來就變成了這個病的名字。
Wiktionary, "rheumatic"
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