Deadly dust: silicosis and the politics of occupational disease in twentieth-century America

It is claimed that the same linguistic means of term-formation as those found in Celsus continued to be used by medical writers until the fifth century, with variation only in detail (pp. 184, 200-1; contrast p. 87). Given the level of generality of the description (borrowing; affixation; semantic extension; use of noun phrases), it would be amazing were other linguistic means found; still, no mention is made of the use of proper names in naming medicaments and instruments. The differences (developments?) in details-such as the status of Greek terms, the types of semantic extension, the lexical function of favoured suffixes, the use of nominalisation-are clear, interesting, surely the very stuff of le latin medical. On the other hand, some studies of narrow scope yield interesting results on particular authors, notably on Celsus (the proposed focus of Memoires XII, to appear in 1993); on Marcellus of Gaul; and on the possible link in terminology between fourth/fifth-century Roman Africa and the translators of eleventh-century Italy. The question of the continuity of development of medical Latin is one on which linguists may return a favour in providing evidence to historians of medicine whose research has made possible linguistic work in this field.