Medical practitioners of the sixteenth century had their own body of special terms, just like the doctors of this century. McConchie examines medical terminology used in a selection of thirteen medical works published between 1547 and 1612, and compares it with treatment of these words in theOxford English Dictionary and other dictionaries of today, showing how well - or ill - the specialist terminology of sixteenth-century medical practitioners has been recorded. He compiles a corpus of new data from a selection of medical texts ranging from scholarly tomes to homely handbooks. Thestudy of this corpus reveals errors, omissions, and biases which raise questions for lexicographical tools in general. Are existing dictionaries adequate in their investigation of Renaissance English? Has current understanding been more biased and more deficient than we thought? If so, how are we toredress the problem? This book uses a specialist semantic domain to raise important issues for lexicographers, and historians of early modern English and medicine.