Name: Illness and the Lexicon
ISBN: 978-1-137-42695-6

Overview

Authors:

Stavroula Varella ⁰

Stavroula Varella
1. School of Education, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
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About this book

This book explores the enigmatic realm of medical terminology. It investigates the nomenclature of illness, tackling words that are socially unspeakable, physically unpronounceable and empirically incomprehensible. This original study draws on a wide range of examples from clinical and non-clinical discourse from the worlds of physiological and psychiatric practice. These are worlds of bedside euphemism, physicians’ club slang and codified medical jargon. This book is about words that matter to everyone: it is about one’s shameful ‘c-word’; about a negligible ‘headache’ that dresses up as ‘cephalalgia’ and sounds instantly more serious; about many, many terms that are linguistically fascinating and culturally significant. Varella ‘reads’ the language of illness for its political and cultural significance and its sense of foreclosure in the face of institutional priorities and pragmatism. This book will be of value to anyone working in and around the fields of historical lexicology, medical discourse, health communication, health psychology.

Authors and Affiliations

School of Education, King's College London, London, United Kingdom

Stavroula Varella

About the author

Stavroula Varella is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chichester, UK. Her previous publications include Language contact and the lexicon in the history of Cypriot Greek (Peter Lang AG, 2006) and Languages and Cultures in Contact and Contrast: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (edited, ATINER, 2011).

Bibliographic Information

Book Title: Illness and the Lexicon
Book Subtitle: Medical Terminology in History, Cultre and Society
Authors: Stavroula Varella
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2025
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-42694-9Due: 12 October 2025
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-42695-6Due: 12 October 2025
Edition Number: 1
Number of Illustrations: 5 b/w illustrations
Topics: Sociolinguistics, Medical Sociology, Historical Linguistics, Health Psychology, Communication Studies

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