28 Feb /17

Fancourt Barnes and His Dictionary of Medical Words

Fancourt Barnes Dictionary of Medical Words
A rare first edition of Fancourt Barnes Dictionary of Medical Words is available at display at EVS Translations Offenbach office, as part of our Book Museum

Robert Sydenham Fancourt Barnes was born in London in 1849, the son of Robert Barnes – a celebrated obstetric physician, gynaecologist, teacher, and author of medical books.

Naturally, Barnes ended up followed the career path of his father. Educated at a school in Honfleur, France, where he became proficient in French; Barnes later attended Lincoln College, Oxford, followed by studying clinical medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital, and obstetrics in Dublin, at the Rotunda Hospital. And eventually graduating MD from Aberdeen University, in 1875.

Returning to London, Barnes became a member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1877 and joined the editorial staff of the British Medical Journal, which set the start of his literary work of articles and papers for medical societies and periodicals.

As a loyal son of Robert Barnes, Fancourt Barnes had clashes with his father’s numerous opponents and his main rival – James Matthews Duncan, a leading obstetric and a Fellow of the Royal Society at the time – resulting in his unsuccessful pursuits to get appointed as a physician or lecturer to any medical school.

His unfavourable position brought him to the Chelsea Hospital for Women, where he excelled in a new area of medical practice – plastic surgery for women. On this subject, he wrote the innovative Perineorrhaphy by Flap Splitting, where through his words and diagrams, he successfully taught operative manoeuvres.

In 1884, father and son Barnes broke from the Obstetrical Society of London to form the British Gynaecological Society, becoming the main vehicle of Fancourt Barnes’ work

And while his most famous work is his only book – A Manual of Midwifery for Midwives, along with the jointly authored with his father System of Obstetric Medicine and Surgery, where among the rest, they also provide a discussion of hermaphroditism, Barnes’ linguistic talent helped him follow the innovative developments in the field of gynaecology overseas.

Realizing that the main medical innovations of the time were taking place in Germany, he firstly translated Eduard Arnold Martin’s Atlas of obstetrics and gynaecology (Martin – a leading German obstetrician, was the founder of the Gynaecological Society in Berlin). The translation, edited by Martin, himself, was published in 1881.

To further answer the 19th century demand for medical words, in the same year, Barnes published his A German-English dictionary of words and terms used in medicine and its cognate sciences.

The British Journal of Psychiatry reviewed the work in a flattering manner: “The want of such a dictionary has long been felt. The reader obtains the great advantage of having in one volume what he would have to search for in many, with the addition of other words which have been omitted in previous dictionaries of this kind. We hope this attempt to meet an important desideratum will be encouraged as it deserves.”

Ironically, considering his field of expertise, Barnes had no children. But his legacy of medical works influenced many practitioners – including Florence Nightingale – and facilitated the development of numerous fields of the modern medicine.

A rare first edition of A German-English dictionary of words and terms used in medicine and its cognate sciences (published in London, in 1881) is available at display at EVS Translations Offenbach office, as part of EVS Translations Book Museum.