"Las declaraciones de esencia" del siglo XVIII: un tipo textual para el estudio de la terminología anatómica

Surgical-legal declarations were often called «declaraciones de esencia» in lawsuits and witness statements in 18th century Spain. These were medical certifications, in which surgeons and blood-letters dictated to a notary a detailed description of the wounds observed in the victim of an aggression. This is a highly interesting textual genre for studying the medical lexicon used in day-to-day therapeutic practice, because it gathers both vernacular vocabulary and technical medical and anatomic terminology used at the time. The article closes with the transcription of seven declarations drawn up by surgeons and blood-letters in the Kingdom of Granada, selected from among the thirty-seven that form our study corpus.