When I use a word . . . Medical slang

Lexicographic anniversariesEvery year since 20161 I have been contributing articles to The BMJ documenting medical anniversaries. The 2016 anniversaries included William Harvey’s 1616 Lumleian lecture to the College of Physicians on the circulation of the blood,2 René Laennec’s invention of the stethoscope in 1816,3 and the description of the Guillain–Barré syndrome by Georges Guillain, Jean Alexandre Barré, and André Strohl in 1916.4On occasion, I have accompanied those articles with pieces on what I call lexicographic anniversaries, by which I mean words whose first instances, recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), can be dated to anniversaries of the year in question. For example, the 170 medical examples for the year 20205 that I discovered included cardialgic (1620), aegophony and stethoscope (both 1820), and electromyographic (1920).The problem with this is that, although the OED’s lexicographers do an excellent job of tracing the earliest uses of the words the dictionary includes, on…
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