Discovery in Haste: English Medical Dictionaries and Lexicographers 1547 to 1796 by Roderick McConchie (review)

Roderick McConchie's Discovery in Haste brings together a career's worth of study of English medical dictionaries from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. This monograph takes on the daunting task of surveying a genre in its approximately 250-year birth-stage and thus tracks the aspects of lexicography, medical vocabulary, medical pedagogy, and social relationships to medical publications that contribute to its formation. Medical terminology, especially terminology that is in or engages meaningfully with vernacular Englishes, is an understudied topic across fields, including the field of lexicography. There is little published on English medical lexicography that hasn't been published by McConchie himself. Indeed, with Discovery in Haste he takes up the period that overlaps and then proceeds from the sixteenth-century focus of his Lexicography and Physicke (1997). The challenge of McConchie's task is compounded not only by the fast pace of change in and rather laissez-faire approach to compiling and disseminating medical ideas during the period in question but also by the technological, social, political, and economic realities of printing and reading that affected the form, authorial treatment, and audience reception of the texts under investigation. McConchie's chapters, on the whole, argue for the initial form of the earliest corpus of English medical dictionaries, and they do so by combining principles of lexicography with careful and thorough situating of texts in their social and practical contexts. This latter component of McConchie's broader argument is an important and captivating aspect of each of his ten body chapters,¹ as he suggests that commercial and professional concerns significantly influenced the shape and content of the dictionaries.

As this is the first large piece of scholarship to address English medical dictionaries that are unified enough in content, form, and goal to consider them a distinct genre, McConchie must draw some boundaries to determine the content of his archive. His introduction is largely devoted to establishing these lines. Broadly speaking, English medical dictionaries from 1547 to 1796 are those texts that are concerned with the codification and curation of medical vocabulary and concepts in discrete entries, exhibit lexicographic organizational qualities (such as alphabetization and the inclusion of etymologies), and, critically, were material, commercial products of a type that had not previously existed in the history of English medical vocabulary. The texts must also convey information primarily in English (although Latin and Greek were regularly and extensively included in many of these texts due to the centrality of these languages in the codification and practice of medicine). Thus, herbals are not included, nor are cookery books, because while many of these sorts of texts are lexicographic in form and contain medical content, they do not justify their own existence with medical aims. Furthermore, manuscript dictionaries are not included, with the implied rather than explicitly stated reason that they were not the commercial products that print dictionaries were.

McConchie begins his body chapters with a lexicographical analysis of the The Breuiary of Helthe (1547) by Andrew Boorde, arguing that it is "the first printed English medical dictionary" (30). Six of the chapters, like Chapter 2 on Boorde's Breuiary, focus just on one text and its compiler. These chapters proceed, for the most part, chronologically by the first publication date of the text under consideration. The remaining four chapters consider groups of texts. Chapter 3 is about medical glossaries, which McConchie concludes had a general tendency to become increasingly simplified in form and content and to adopt a preference for English headwords (66). Chapter 4 takes up a particular set of glossaries: those appended to English translations of Lazare Rivière's The Practice of Physick (1655) and of Jean de Renou's A Medicinal Dispensatory (1657). Chapter 5 is a very brief picture of two works originally composed and published in Latin, by Englishmen (being major exceptions to the rest of the book's focus...