4 - Dissecting Matter

Summary

This chapter explores the contours of illness and embodiment in medical lexicography. From the early modern period, dictionaries subjected sexual deviance to medical as well as legal and moral regulation, as abominable acts were linked with aberrant anatomies. While hard-word and general dictionaries offered cautionary tales of hypospadians committing bestiality and sodomites afflicted with anal disfigurements, specialist medical lexicons were far more preoccupied with women who had sex with women. Lexicographers endowed these tribades or confricatrices with preternaturally large clitorises which they used to have penetrative sex—though whether clitoral enlargement was the cause of tribadism or its consequence was a question whose answer varied from one author to the next. That dictionaries aimed at physicians were able to dissect women’s sexuality with such candour prompts us to consider the exclusivity of medical lexicography in both social and material terms: with respect to the barring of women from the elite medical professions until the late nineteenth century, and to the escalating price of specialist works compared to the cost of dictionaries aimed at lay users.