Abstract
A View of the Ottoman Turkish Medical Terms Dictionary
Historical medical texts are of paramount importance in showing the processes in the field of medicine from past to present. When considering the context in which these texts were produced, there are a great number of theoretical and practical information. However, most of this information has lost their validity today. These texts are of importance in terms of terminology.
Difficulties may be lived in interpreting and reading certain medical terms when reading medical texts. The first source referenced in this regard is the Ottoman Turkish Medical Terms Dictionary prepared by Ekrem Kadri Unat, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu and Suat Vural which was published by Turkish Historical Society. This dictionary consisting of four chapters includes medical terms in Ottoman Turkish, Turkish and French languages. However, this dictionary is not sufficient in providing counterparts of certain medical terms.
In this study, the index of medical texts belonging to different centuries will be searched and the medical terms that cannot be found in the mentioned dictionary will be identified. The capacity of Turkish to provide counterparts of medical terms will also be evaluated with this process. This may result in the necessity of preparing a new medical terms dictionary related to medical terms in this field.
Keywords
Medical texts, medical terms, medical terms dictionary.