Like people, words have birthdays. My definition of the birthday of a word is the year in which it first appeared in a written text, as, for example, documented in the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ). Even though many words have had a conversational life preceding their written one, I count that as the fetal stage in their development. Their appearance in the world is marked by their first appearance in print. In some cases the documented birthday can be antedated by finding earlier examples of the use of the word in print; in my experience, this happens to about 10% of biomedical words. Counting anniversaries as having occurred in multiples of 50 years, I have searched for biomedical words whose birthdays fell in years ending in ’24 and ’74 and have found 144 of them. Among these, my favourites are “impostumation,” an obsolete word for an abscess, dating from 1524, as used by William Harvey in prescriptions he wrote in 1653 and 1655 for John Aubrey; “cybrid,” a word stil
France
Spain
Greece
Chinchon
Madrid
Peru
Greek
French
Spanish
John-aubrey
Lewis-carroll
Jeffreyk-aronson