Classical and Vernacular Terminology in the 1525 English Version of Hieronymus Brusnchwig’s Buch der Cirurgia

Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Buch der Cirurgia is the first surgical handbook printed in German. It is transmitted in five different editions, the first of which was printed in 1497 by Johannes Grüninger in Strasburg. This compilation of Classical, Arabic, Medieval and Late Medieval sources, integrated by the author’s personal experience had an extraordinary success in 16th-century Europe, as witnessed by the existence, in addition to the Low German one, of various adaptations and translations: Low German (Rostock, 1518) and Dutch (Utrecht, 1535). In 1525 this surgical compendium became also popular in the English speaking area, where it was printed in London by Petrus Treueris under the title The noble experyence of the virtuous handy Warke of surgery / practysyd and compiled by the moost expert mayster Jherome of Bruynswyke. In my previous studies on the surgical terminology of both Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Buch der Cirurgia and of the Low German Boek der Wundenartzstedye I tried to demonstrate that they not only follow the pattern described by Pörksen (1994) as Fachwerksprache with the universally recognized and crystallized medical vocabulary of classical origin representing a warranty against potentially lethal misunderstandings, but that they often have recourse to bilingual synonymic couples, in order to make the readers familiar with those Latin and Greek terms which were taken for granted by the learned Medieval physician, but were, in general, completely unknown to the surgeons of the time, who lacked classic university education. In this study, I'll focus on this English translation of the German handbook, paying particular attention to the specialized terminology used to refer to the semantic fields of anatomy, pathology, surgical technique and instruments, in order to outline the relationship between vernacular and classical terminology. In this way, it will be possible to ascertain whether English scientific lexicon could be considered less precarious and arbitrary than its German counterpart, or if it required to be disambiguated by the universally recognized and crystallized medical vocabulary of classical origin, thus avoiding any potentially lethal misunderstanding.