Chapter 13. The popularization of learned medicine in late seventeenth-century England

Abstract

Following from the popularizing work of Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654), who published an unauthorized translation of the Royal College of Physicians’ Pharmacopoeia in 1649, the late seventeenth century witnessed the publication of an unprecedented number of vernacular medical texts, many of which were translations. As the sources of most of these texts had been published in Latin by some of the most important medical authors of the time with the intent of circulating them only among the European medical elite, their translation into English had a profound ideological significance, because it rendered them virtually accessible to all who could read. This chapter analyzes five such vernacularizations in order to gain an insight into the specific translation methods and procedures that were adopted by translators to accommodate the specialized subject and language of medicine to an audience of non-specialists.