vi PREFACE 



gather even the spurious, debased, or counterfeit coins. Not even may the " ghost -words," n 

 the unnamed and unnamable terata of scholarship or ignorance be thrown out, for they serve 

 least as warnings and danger signals to the unwary. Posterity will choose, whether wisely 

 unwisely, at least wilfully, and will restamp with its approval what it pleases. For the rest, 

 of old, the " bad words" need not be looked for, nor put to service. Thus, in a way, tl 

 dictionary of modern medicine is a sort of crude topographic map, drawn to large sea 

 from the hurried and often inaccurate messages of the scouts and spies of science,, for the i 

 struction of the army which follows. 



The history of lexicography finds its first data about 700 or 800 A. D., in glosses, or th< 

 more common explanatory words annexed or superposed over ' ' hard ' ' terms, and made eithe 

 in Latin or in the glossator's own vernacular. A list of such glosses was called a glossarium, 

 as we say, a glossary. It soon became the custom for children and students to learn by heart the 

 classified lists of the names of things, such as those of the parts of the body, of animals, trades 

 tools, virtues and vices, diseases, etc. Such a list constituted a vocabularium, or vocabulary 

 These glosses and vocabularies were in time thrown together in bundles, at first without an 

 order, and as lists, without losing their individuality. Then came the ''first letter order," i: 

 which all words and terms beginning with the letter a, were bundled together, still withou 

 discrimination, so that the entire list of words beginning with a, or b, had to be scanned i 

 order to find a special word. The classification proceeded to an arrangement of the item 

 also according to the second letter, then the third, etc., until after hundreds of years complet 

 alphabetization came into use. At first the aim had been to explain difficult Latin words b 

 easier Latin ones ; then by English ones, and in the tenth and eleventh centuries the 

 equivalents were the rule, and the glossaries were Latin-English. The first book of this kind t 

 be called a dictionarium , that is a repertory of dictiones or sayings, was that of Sir Thomas Elyc 

 in 1538, and from that time the word dictionary has supplanted all others ; so much so that it i 

 now the title of any alphabetic gathering not only of words but of any kind of knowledt: 

 whatsoever. 



Our modern language of medicine is unique in that it is made up of the unchanged an 

 undigested materials and relics used or contributed during its entire history. The persistin 

 substratum is Latin, upon which has been placed a mass of pseudogreek words, not physiologicl 

 created nor grown by natural philologic methods, but springing Minervalike from the brains c 

 thousands of modern Jupiters. These largely bear the marks of their parentage in characteristic 

 that do not, or should not, beget a spontaneous pride of lineage. From a highly variegate 

 medievalism that has, indeed, never ended, we have taken over another unassimiJabl 

 conglomerate, and superadded are thousands of dissimilar terms derived from modern chemist: \ 

 biology, bacteriology, and many other sciences. Each single group of contemporaneot 

 nationalities contributes to the others its share of names, and is itself hard at work endeavoring t 

 fuse the whole heritage into homogeneity and unity with the amalgam of the spirit of the genen 

 language dominant among its people. The result is a strange hodge-podge of the medic 

 language of two or more thousand years and of many special national tongues, in mechanic, n< 

 chemic mixture, with modern sounds and symbols, the whole amazingly heterogeneous an| 

 cacophonous. The thirtieth century medical student will probably be compelled to memori; 

 iter a tertio ad quartitm ventriculum, etc., and to write his orders for drugs in a sad mixture 1 

 sorry Latin so far as his knowledge will carry, and then to end it in despair in the vulgij 

 manner of speech of his contemporaries. In general biology the law holds that the ontogei 

 epitomizes and repeats the phylogeny ; but only at the different successive stages ol ij 

 individual development. In medical language the phylum is always present, and there are r 

 successive stages ; there has been no rebirth or inheritance; the ontogeny goes on pn 



