Merriam-Webster’s Medical Desk Dictionary: Hardcover Edition - Hardcover

Thomson Delmar Learning

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877791252 ISBN 13: 9780877791256

Publisher: Delmar Cengage Learning, 1996

Synopsis

An invaluable resource for health care professionals in understanding the language of contemporary health and medicine. It is a comprehensive, easy-to-use guide of over 57,000 entries to today's most widely used health-care terms, abbreviations, medication names and more.

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Reviews

At first glance, one may wonder why yet another medical dictionary is needed when there are such classics as Black's Medical Dictionary, Blakiston's Gould Medical Dictionary, and Stedman's Medical Dictionary. Merriam Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary, an update of the 1986 edition published as Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary, is written for laypeople. Its format and size remain unchanged. According to the publisher, there are more than 5,000 new words, and 6,000 definitions have been revised. Definitions for such terms as AIDS have been extensively revised to reflect the Center for Disease Control's new criteria. As in the previous one, some 1,000 biographies of individuals whose names are an integral part of the medical literature are included.

The publisher claims that this volume "combines a medical wordlist (including British terms and spelling variants) selected and defined on the basis of citational evidence." Since there are several million medically relevant citations, a critical review of those included in this dictionary was made. Also, every word used in the defining vocabulary had to be in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. The result is a usable and understandable dictionary that includes pronunciation, capitalization, division, usage, and variants. There are no illustrations. The definitions are concise and technical but still understandable by the educated layperson.

This dictionary will not replace the standard medical dictionaries in medical libraries but is the reasonably priced medical dictionary of choice for school and public libraries. It would be especially useful for secretaries and nonmedical users.

Edition details

• Publisher: Delmar Cengage Learning
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877791252
• ISBN 13: 9780877791256
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 894