[Ads-l] Antedating of "Anesthesia"

Shapiro, Fred fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU
Mon Dec 26 13:27:21 UTC 2022


I meant to type "anesthesia (OED 1721)" rather than "anesthesiology (OED 1721)."

Fred Shapiro



________________________________
From: Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
Sent: Sunday, December 25, 2022 12:01 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Antedating of "Anesthesia"

anesthesiology (OED 1721)

According to an article by Rajesh P. Haridas in the journal Anestheiology, Nov. 2017:

The earliest identified English definition of the word anaisthesia was discovered in the first edition (1684) of A Physical Dictionary, an English translation of Steven Blankaart’s medical dictionary, Lexicon Medicum Graeco-Latinum. This definition was almost certainly the source of the definition of anaesthesia which appeared in Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708), a general-purpose English dictionary compiled by the lexicographer John Kersey. The words anaisthesia and anaesthesia have not been identified in English medical or surgical publications that antedate the earliest English dictionaries in which they are known to have been defined.

Fred Shapiro

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