Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould.

  • George M. Gould
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/196 page 11
    conquer all linguistic difficulties, and make our medical language a real and not a parasitic part of the English language. In so far as it remains semidetached, unassim¬ ilated, a gibberishlike half-English, just so long will medi¬ cine be a half-science, and our art a trade. And now, what is the great hindrance to the attainment of this most desirable anglicization of medical language and the scienciation of medicine itself? Nothing in the world but the conservative sticklers who will not permit, or fondly imagine that they are forbidding, progress in Eng¬ lish philology. Of course they cannot do much harm, these old ladies with their brooms, because, happily, tides, whether oceanic or linguistic, do not pay much attention to antique dames or brooms. The most unstable of all created things is language. While in a way strictly evolu¬ tionistic there are still a hundred unanswered whys as to every law of phonology. Language is the very Proteus of the old myth. Printing has undoubtedly served to fix in some measure the form of words, but that subtle, water¬ like instability and mutability of sound will never in the least be harnessed to or much “broken” by the printed word. The result is that we have, and especially in Eng¬ lish is it peculiarly true, two languages, the spoken and the printed. The word though should be spelled with two letters, the Anglosaxon thorn letter th and o ; the word laugh has three sounds, and so with nearly every word in the dictionaries. Shall we then start on the “fonetik tak ? ” Heaven forbid ! The sole reason that England and the English language are what they are, the sole reason why the nation, the race, and its tongue are the best we have, and are bound, meek or not, to inherit the earth, is that they and we are evolutionists, and not revolutionists, nor devolution- ists. A language or a form of government is the handi¬ work of a people, its art-products, the outcome of its psychic life. The Anglosaxon way is to guarantee and demand freedom for the individual, and that all changes
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3