El vocabulario terminológico de medicina de Manuel Hurtado de Mendoza

Abstract

From the early nineteenth century, Spanish physicians started to sense a «threat» to the language of medicine which they used, due in part to the large numberof foreign terms they were forced to import from other languages, particularly French. Many voices emerged to denounce this situation and propose potential solutions such as those which would be derived from the creation of a terminological dictionary which would fix precise meanings for medical terms. It was Manuel Hurtado de Mendoza who eventually dared to take on this task and develop the first modern terminological dictionary of medicine in Spanish. The intention of this paper is to present from a philological viewpoint the process by which a lexicographical work that deserves to be better known and used in studies on historical lexicography came to be constructed.