When I use a word . . . The earliest placebo

An antedating, lexicographically speaking, is an earlier instance of the use of a word in a text than had previously been recorded. There are many examples of medical words whose earliest occurrences antedate the earliest examples given in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). To mention just a few examples, they include: drip, antedatable from 1933 to 1920; lymphadenopathy, antedatable from 1920 to 1915; and medicalized, antedatable from 1970 to 1913 (in The BMJ, as it happens). And even earlier instances of those words might yet be discovered. If the several different meanings of “anamnesis,” mostly related to forms of recall, were to be listed separately in the dictionary, several antedatings could also be claimed in relation to its use to mean the medical history. When “placebo” was first treated in the OED in 1907 it was dated to 1811, in Robert Hooper’s Medical Dictionary. In the 1989 second edition, that was antedated to 1785, in George Motherby’s New Medical Dictionary, even though an earlier instance, in the clinical lectures of the Edinburgh physician William Cullen, was already known, and detailed in the James Lind Library. Now the lexicographers have further antedated the word to 1770 in the lectures of another Edinburgh physician, Andrew Duncan the Elder or Primus. Was “placebo” in its modern medical meaning coined in the Edinburgh medical school, which this year celebrates its 300th anniversary?