In order to make it […] easy’ : metalinguistic discourse in 18th-century British Medical Writing

During the 18th-century, the advances in medicine as well as a growing awareness of health issues favoured the circulation of an expanding medical vocabulary (cfr. Loudon 1992, Lane 2001, Harrison 2010) and the publication of multifarious medical texts (cfr. Fissel 2007: 110; cfr. also Lindemann 2010: 111-112). Reference works for experts at different levels (scholars, physicians, surgeons, practitioners, apothecaries, etc.) and non-experts (educated readers) began to circulate ‘massively’ (cfr. Lane 2001: 24 ff.). The authors aimed at “diffusing medical knowledge among the people” (Buchan 1772: xxiii). This also meant that medical writers needed to develop disciplinary communicative strategies to deal with a complex and challenging matter (cfr. Banks 2008) “to render the book[s] more generally useful […] as well as acceptable to the intelligent part of mankind” (Buchan 1772: xi). This debate, more often than not carried on in the prefaces to reference works, is particularly intense in the second half of the 18th century.