When I use a word ... * Materia medica, clinical pharmacology, and therapeutics

There is an urgent need to develop individuals who have the ability to combine a firm grounding in the principles of basic and clinical pharmacology with the most modern research technologies to address complex (patho)physiological questions               The Wellcome Trust, 2007 Which is the oldest medical specialty? Figure 1 shows various ologies against the dates of their first recorded uses, as listed in the Oxford English Dictionary . That is not to say that these specialties did not exist before their names were invented or first recorded—all subjects have a prehistory and there may be earlier citations to be discovered. But pharmacology comes first by a long way, barring the three other cornerstones of medical science, anatomy, pathology and physiology. The first recorded instance is in Essays on the Preservation & Recovery of Health (1704) by the Reverend Thomas Curteis, in which he described pharmacology as a ‘boundless field’. Clinical pharmacology, in the guise of materia medica, dates from no later than 1771, when Tobias Smollett mentioned it in his epistolary novel Humphry Clinker . And toxicology was not far behind, first appearing in Robert Hooper's Compendious Medical Dictionary in 1799. Figure 1 The dates of first citations of medical subject names in the Oxford English Dictionary . The term ‘materia medica’ was originally a direct translation of the Greek title of Dioscorides’ five-volume herbal treatise, written in the first century AD, ![Graphic][1] (peri hulēs iatrikēs), which literally … [1]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif