'Wise and Learned Cunctation': Medical Terminology 1547-1612 and the OED

'WISE AND LEARNED CUNCTATION': MEDICAL TERMINOLOGY 1547-1612 AND THE OED R. W. McConchie One rather peripheral implication of this essay is that Shakespeare is not the most fertile coiner of new words in the English language; worse still, he probably does not step aside for Sir Thomas Browne or for the Authorized Version. As will shortly appear, critics may have to resign that putative laurel to one William Clever, a physician so obscure as to be unmentioned in the DNB, and in respect of changing and enriching the language, totally unknown. But then claims about Shakespeare's verbal creativity, or indeed that of Browne or the Authorized Version or Milton, have been based on a self-fulfilling prophecy, enshrined in the pages of the OED, and only recently subjected to an exhaustive analysis. No one of course seriously denies that the OED is an outstanding, indeed unparalleled research tool, perhaps the most basic tool available to English studies. But because this is so, it is of increasing urgency to know more about this splendid tool; to understand just how good it is and what kinds ofinformation it can supply. It is also necessary to know how objective and how reliable that information is, and to do that we must enquire into the principles by which the OED was compiled and the assumptions on which it was based. The primary interest of this paper is one very small part of that enterprise. It concerns the relationship between first citations in the OED and their actual and potential antedatings from medical texts. The material under examination here is severely restricted in scope, both by its subject matter and by the relatively small number of antedatings so far available. The texts analyzed for ante22 R. W. McConchie23 datings are a small selection of medical books from the period, 1547-1612—a period, it should be noted, which has already been very well covered by the compilers ofthe OED. The texts in question are, in chronological order: 1.Langton, C. An introduction into phisicke, with an universal dyet (c. 1550;1 cited as IP) 2.Langton, C. A uery brefe treatise, ordrely declaring the principal partes of phisick .... (1547; cited as VBT) 3.Bostocke, R. The difference betweene the auncient and the modern physicke (1 585)2 4.Clever, W. The Flower ofphysicke (1590) 5.Cotta, J. A short discouerie of the vnobserued dangers of seuerall sorts of ignorant and vnconsiderate practisers of physicke in England (1612)3. Of these works only one, Cotta's, has been previously read for the OED. This study is not intended to be understood as a censure of the OED or its methods. The OED's stated objective concerning the kind ofterminology which forms a significant proportion of these corrections was "... to include all words in English form, except those ofwhich an explanation would be unintelligible to any but the specialist" (OED, xxviii), and some of the words or senses of words cited here would fall under that exclusion. A question ofbasic interest for users ofthe OED which is still unanswered is whether the number of actual or potential antedatings is sufficient significantly to alter our assessment of the state of the English lexicon at a given period. The limitations imposed by a necessary reliance on written sources has always been accepted, but recent work has shown that acute problems confront us. Murray himself suggested that 75% of OED main lemmas might prove antedatable, although he was confident that in most 24 Medical Terminology 1 547-1612 and the OED cases the time-span of the revisions would be small. It seems now that his estimate of the possible number of antedatings may have erred on the side of pessimism, but that of the time-span on the side of optimism. The recent studies by Jürgen Schäfer have shown, on a statistical rather than an intuitive basis, that there are indeed sufficient potential antedatings tojustify large scale investigation.4 He suggests on statistical grounds that perhaps about 96,000 ofthe OED's 240,000 main lemmas are antedatable, assuming an authorial reliability rate of 66%.5 In the case ofthe texts examined in the present...