Learning medical terminology and disseminating wellbeing in Violet Honnor Morten’s Nurse’s Dictionary of Medical Terms and Nursing Treatment

Although official historical accounts of (English) lexicography tend to present it as a predominantly male preserve which eclipses women’s contribution to the field, scholars have amply demonstrated the importance of women’s various roles within dictionary-making throughout the centuries. When considering the specific case of medical dictionaries, however, women’s endeavours have generally been neglected in academic studies; nevertheless, the practice of feminist historiography may help recover previously underrated or hidden works by also exposing deficiencies made from ‘the top’ and by decentring the male subject. Indeed, by including women in the historical reconstruction of English lexicography, we can address silences and highlight relations of exploitation, domination, censorship, and erasure. This paper proposes a contribution that may help in the recovering of women’s medical dictionaries by taking into consideration the specific case-study of Violet Honnor Morten’s Nurse’s Dictionary of Medical Terms and Nursing Treatment (1891), which proved to bring together typically feminised and masculinised domains of knowledge (that is, household management and medicine). By also taking into account the gendered status of the compiler and of the intended audience (which naturally mainly included nurses, but possibly wives and mothers as well, as the dictionary may have been used as a learning aid to be consulted at home too), we will look at how this tool was employed to learn medical terms and, thus, how it could be considered a linguistic reference for studying English for specific purposes (ESP). The dictionary fashioned shared meanings, practical knowledge, and consultative reading practice, and, apart from the more obvious function of defining technical terminology, it also provided guidance concerning pronunciation and tips for remembering difficult words belonging to the field of medicine. Expected results will shed light on both the educational nature of this dictionary and on its socially empowering role too, as Morten was not just a nurse, but a suffragist as well: thus, the Nurse’s Dictionary should be read and analysed not simply as a language reference work for the dissemination of medical knowledge and, consequently, of practices of wellbeing, but also as evidence of Victorian women’s creation of a feminine public sphere where they sought to carve out their own place in the diffusion of (professional) medical expertise within the context of late nineteenth-century English medical lexicography.