Book Description

This book offers an overview of the vernacularization and popularization of learned medical knowledge in the late seventeenth century, a particularly significant moment in English history on account of the social and cultural transformations in progress at the time. Starting with a survey of the medical texts that were translated from Latin into English in such a pivotal period, the book provides an insight into their context of production and an analysis of the actual translation strategies and procedures that were exploited at the macro- and micro-textual levels in order to disseminate the specialized subject and language of learned medicine to a wider, non-specialized audience. In addition to some very popular texts, including Nicholas Culpeper’s 1649 unauthorized translation of the Royal College of Physicians’s Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, the volume also discusses more obscure and previously neglected publications, which nonetheless played a fundamental role in the popularization of learned medicine.