Stedman's Electronic Medical Dictionary

Abstract

We still remember our first encounter as medical students with the intimidating vocabulary of medicine—not only Latin words, which seemed incomprehensible, but, even worse, terms commemorating prominent past figures. (What, exactly, is anti-Trendelenburg?) We also recall the sense of relief when, after some delay, we purchased our first medical dictionaries, which we still use to this very day. Stedman's Electronic Medical Dictionary contains the entire text of the 26th edition of Stedman's Medical Dictionary (book version). Unfortunately, the illustrations are omitted from the electronic version. After quick and simple installation of the software, one is presented with a self-explanatory search screen. Besides the straightforward word search, searching options also include Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), Browse on index (useful when looking up long terms or when the precise spelling is unknown), and Previous and Next entry. The useful History (log-file) feature brings up a list of all previously searched