Medical entries in 18th-century encyclopaedias : the lexicographic construction of knowledge

The aim of applying new technical and scientific discoveries to benefit mankind is the main purpose of early modern research in Britain, and is typical of a process well established since the 17th century (Jardine 1999; Hunter 1981). The experimental method based on observation, collection of data, reproducibility of phenomena, deduction and application to the world around, with a view to making progress possible, can therefore be considered as representative of the principles inspiring 18th-century encyclopaedias. Their content and form are an evident and perhaps necessary expression of a great change in the interpretation of the world: the research and discovery path has as its ultimate aim utility, beyond any speculative, purely theoretical attitude. This means that concrete facts should therefore be transformed through language into written texts which everybody can take advantage of (Formigari 1974; Banks 2008; Gotti 2011). Alongside the development of the encyclopaedic genre, the 18th century witnessed great changes in the medical field and in the social approach to medicine as well (French & Wear 1991; Lane 2001; Loudon 1986 and 1992; Riley 1987): new concepts, new processes and new techniques, besides the layman’s interest in them, emerged with force. Medical research, which directly goes back to the outstanding approaches and discoveries of the preceding century (Lindemann 2010; Wear 1989 and 2000), urged experts and non-experts alike to develop new communicative strategies both to categorize, organize, describe and discuss advanced issues, and to apply pioneering approaches to well-known and completely new situations. Medical writing thus became an expanding phenomenon and an essential one to record medical debate and experience, both in the early modern English period (Taavitsainen & Pahta 2011a; McConchie & Curzan 2011; McConchie 1997; Dirckx 1976) and later, particularly after 1750 when the English Medical reform was definitely taking place (Bynum & Porter 1992; Fissel 2007; Warren 1951). The present analysis focuses on the first editions of the three most relevant 18th-century ‘dictionaries of arts and sciences’: John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum (LT, 1704), Ephraïm Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (Cy, 1728), and the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Br, 1768-1771). The percentage covered by medical terminology in LT, Cy and Br (approximately between 8% and 13%) takes on notable significance, considering the high number of branches of knowledge included in the three works. In particular, in Cy, an elaborate tree of knowledge is included in the preface, whereas in Br the most important branches of arts and science are organized into treatises (amongst which MEDICINE and SURGERY). The tendency to increase the number of medical entries from LT to Br testifies to the great interest in medicine and in medical vocabulary, and also guarantees a great variety of examples (for a general survey of this topic, Lonati 2002 and 2007).