Abstract
The study examines five names of medieval medical practitioners: barber, doctor, leech, physician, and surgeon. The aim is to view the semantic change of those names in non-medical prose texts from the Middle English period. The analysis also considers their origin, frequency, semantic fields, function and both metaphorical and non-metaphorical meanings in Middle English and later. Furthermore, the research verifies to what extent the findings of Sylwanowicz (2003) are confirmed by the results of a similar examination of a non-medical corpus. The data for the study come from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, with the support of historical dictionaries.
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Reference20 articles.
1. Booth, Christopher. 2018. “Physician, Apothecary, or Surgeon? The Medieval Roots of Professional Boundaries in Later Medical Practice.” Midlands Historical Review 2: 1–11.
2. Bosworth, Joseph and Toller, T. Northcote. 2013. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online. Available at www.bosworthtoller.com
3. diPaolo Healey, Antonette. 2003. Dictionary of Old English A-F. CD-Rom. Dictionary of Old English Project, University of Toronto.
4. Dekeyser, Xavier. 1995. “Travel, Journey and Voyage: An Exploration into the Realm of Middle English Lexico-Semantics.” NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution 25: 127–136.
5. Ellis, Harold. 2001. “The Company of Barbers and Surgeons.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 94.10: 548–549.