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Who needs medical dictionaries? Students of medicine and allied professions and crafts need them to find brief, clear definitions of terms encountered in their reading. Medical writers and editors need them to verify spellings, plurals, abbreviations, and kindred linguistic minutiae. Journalists, lawyers, and insurance clerks need them for their own multifarious if not nefarious purposes. Medical transcriptionists need them to find words that dictating physicians have mispronounced or misused, and hence some physicians evidently need them too. For all of the above, the latestDorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionaryhas the answers. The definitions in this latest edition perpetuateDorland'straditionally high standards of succinctness, lucidity, and precision. It is a pleasure to read the work of lexicographers who not only understand what they are writing about but also handle relative clauses and participles with authority, and even know the difference betweencomposeandcomprise. A comparison of this edition with
John H. Dirckx (Wed,) studied this question.