Silvia Pireddu, The landscape of the body: the language of medicine in Samuel Johnson s Dictionary, in Textus, Vol.I

This article explores the presence of words related to the body and medicine in Johnson’s Dictionary and proves that as to physick – actually the word medicine indicated remedies rather than the discipline – it was encyclopaedic but not prescriptive.It considers medicine from a cultural point of view rather than biographical in order to set the technicalities of the lexicon and the discipline into a broader intellectual perspective. It focuses exclusively on the Dictionary to discuss ideas about science and the need for order, recognition and classification which lexicography shares with it.