From leech to doctor: The Lexical and Semantic Evolution of Terms for ‘physician’ in Non-Medical Prose Texts
From leech to doctor: The Lexical and Semantic Evolution of Terms for ‘physician’ in Non-Medical Prose Texts

Summary/Abstract: The study examines five names of medieval medical practitioners: barber, doctor, leech, physician, and surgeon. The aim is to view the semantic change of those names in non- medical prose texts from the Middle English period. The analysis also considers their origin, frequency, semantic fields, function and both metaphorical and non-metaphorical meanings in Middle English and later. Furthermore, the research verifies to what extent the findings of Sylwanowicz (2003) are confirmed by the results of a similar examination of a non-medical corpus. The data for the study come from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, with the support of historical dictionaries.

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