The Words of Medicine: Sources, Meanings, and Delights by Robert Fortuine. Charles C Thomas, $59.95, pp 424. ISBN 0 398 07133 0. See www.ccthomas.com for ordering details. Rating:

Why do we call a stamp collector a philatelist? Most collectors are called by the name of the thing they collect plus a suffix. Some are –ists (ex-librists, incunabulists) and some are –ologists (deltiologists, tegestologists); some are –philes (discophiles, notaphiles), –aries (antiquaries, mirabiliaries), –ians (aurelians, Elzevirians), –ers (mossers, pasquinaders), or -os (curiosos, bottle-os); some are just plain -men, like eggmen—perhaps women are not so quirky. When the pursuit becomes fanatical the collector becomes a maniac (bibliomaniac, timbromaniac).

But the word philatelist is different. Originally, in France, if the sender prepaid the postage costs, the missive was marked “franco de port,” meaning free of carriage charge [to the recipient], and bore a stamped mark (a frank) or an adhesive label (a postage stamp) to signify the fact. So in 1864 a French timbrophilist called Herpin proposed, in Le Collectionneur de Timbres-poste, that his hobby should be called philatélie, from ε ' ξ τλι ′ασ (ex ateleias), the Greek for franco, gratis.

Robert Fortuine is a sort of philatelist, but the stamps that he collects are medical words. And as philatelists organise their stamps in groups of definitives, commemoratives, or thematics, so he arranges his word collection in different categories. Here you will find medicine's flora and fauna, such as roses from hell and raccoon eyes, fruits and vegetables (prune belly, the lenticular nucleus), weapons and instruments of punishment (halberd bones, flagella), music and dance (drumstick fingers, Sydenham's chorea), mythology and literature (Minerva jacket and Harlequin fetus, the latter curiously included under religion). Not to mention confusibles and euphemisms, eponyms and acronyms. The many lists are exhaustive and few areas are untouched, art being an exception—I failed to find Castellani's paint, the still life gene, the Bradford frame, the Mona Lisa hypothesis, RENOIR, or PICASSO.

Disappointingly, Dr Fortuine does not give the detailed stories that underpin so many medical words. He also uncritically accepts the earliest citation of a word in the Oxford English Dictionary as the time of its earliest record, which is not always so. His treatment of chickenpox illustrates both of these points: he briefly mentions only two of several proposed origins, and because the OED quotes the Chambers Cyclopaedia of 1727-38 for its earliest citation, he names the 1730s as the time of first record, although the term can actually be traced back at least to 1694 (BMJ 2000;321:682).

What should we call such a collector of words? Philologist is already taken, but perhaps a verbiary, logophile, or rhematist? And for the real fanatic, how about logomaniac or even logoholic? For Dr Fortuine, however, perhaps the best term is one derived from a Greek word for a herbalist—rhizotomist, literally one who collects roots for medical purposes.