This chapter explores the contours of illness and embodiment in medical lexicography. From the early modern period, dictionaries subjected sexual deviance to medical as well as legal and moral regulation, as abominable acts were linked with aberrant anatomies. While hard-word and general dictionaries offered cautionary tales of hypospadians committing bestiality and sodomites afflicted with anal disfigurements, specialist medical lexicons were far more preoccupied with women who had sex with women. Lexicographers endowed these tribades or confricatrices with preternaturally large clitorises which they used to have penetrative sex—though whether clitoral enlargement was the cause of tribadism or its consequence was a question whose answer varied from one author to the next. That dictionaries aimed at physicians were able to dissect women’s sexuality with such candour prompts us to consider the exclusivity of medical lexicography in both social and material terms: with respect to the barring of women from the elite medical professions until the late nineteenth century, and to the escalating price of specialist works compared to the cost of dictionaries aimed at lay users.

Chapter 3 offers a double biography of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and Alexander von Humboldt (1767–1859) until the latter’s departure for the Americas, and does so for two reasons: Not only did the two brothers grow up together in an intimate fraternal relationship (with their father lost and their mother estranged), and did so despite differences in personality and interest, but Alexander also became a major resource through his own linguistic-ethnographic observations with Indigenous peoples of the Americas and as a liaison for resources from American contacts on his elder brother’s behalf. In short, Alexander served as the eyes and ears of William, who never crossed the Atlantic. On his return to Europe, Alexander then brought along major linguistic works for Wilhelm’s library. Over the years, the two Humboldts would grow even closer to each other, as evident in their organismic perspectives of language and nature.

While engaged in helping rebuild a post-Napoleonic Prussia and Europe after his Roman years, Humboldt pursued several linguistic projects: a linguistic cartography of Europe applicable to other continents; initial analyses of Nahuatl; grammatical sketches of seven other Mexican languages; a programmatic comparative-contrastive statement of linguistics in “Essai sur les langues du nouveau Continent;” an in-depth analysis of Quechua of the Andes plus grammatical sketches for Araucano (Mapuche), Guaraní, and Muisca of South America; comparative studies of Aztecan, Mayan, or Tupian language families and linguistic areas; introduction to Massachusett, Mahican, and Onondaga grammars of eastern North America; noun incorporation versus polysynthesis; growing understanding of verbal morphology, including the zero morpheme; “inner forms” of American languages; attention to language contact and also to extralinguistic, sociocultural scenes and wider contexts as part of comprehensive descriptions and explanations of differences and changes in languages without literary traditions in substitution of historical records.

When Alexander was exploring the rainforest of northern South America at the turn of the nineteenth-century, Wilhelm pursued intensive sociolinguistic-ethnographic fieldwork on Basque, a non-Indo-European isolate, in the Pyrenees of Spain. Basque would attest as an ergative-absolutive language comparatively rare in Europe, but quite common in the Americas. Research on a language without a philological tradition required linguistic and anthropological field research, including the learning of its grammar, its uses and contexts, plus accompanying sociocultural customs. Humboldt recognized Basque as “a living image of their way of thinking and feeling,” for which he drew on proverbs, poetry, music, and dances. Conversely, distinctive Basque society was intelligible solely through the Basque language as part of an integrated theory of language in culture and society. Although Humboldt never identified Basque as Native American, his journey to the Pyrenees then became his substitute for a voyage to the Americas in the mind of German Humboldtians.

Humboldt also influenced a second generation of American linguists: Francis Lieber, who still had been a personal protégé of Humboldt’s and who studied Black English of South Carolina, English creoles of the Caribbean, and Chinook Jargon together with language acquisition; Albert S. Gatschet as a former student of the Humboldtian J. C. Eduard Buschmann in Berlin and as the only professional linguist at J. W. Powell’s Bureau of American Ethnology, studying diverse American languages; and Daniel G. Brinton, who examined Humboldt intensively, translated an essay of his on the verb in American languages into English, but misinterpreted Humboldt in social-evolutionist terms. Despite individual achievements, the second generation of American Humboldtians ultimately remained too disjointed to have much of a long-term impact, and Brinton appeared a renegade with his continued insistence on social Darwinism. When Brinton passed away, Humboldtian ideas evidently had little of a chance for survival in the United States.

Humboldt personally inspired American linguists of the early nineteenth century such as Peter S. Duponceau and John Pickering (both by correspondence) plus A. Albert Gallatin (probably in person by Alexander’s introduction and perhaps by correspondence) as the first generation of American Humboldtians. Whereas Duponceau had already been impressed by Humboldt’s sociolinguistic field study of Basque, he and Pickering responded to Humboldt’s inquiries for information on North American languages; but Duponceau and Pickering also drew on the Prussian as a descriptive-analytical linguist with a broad hemispheric, even global comparative foundation, a solid interest in linguistic-cultural alterity and diverse language use, language change, and linguistic typology. Thus, they came to share a broad range of linguistic topics. In contrast, Gallatin likely found primary inspiration in Humboldt's early model of linguistic cartography for his own early maps of American languages and for his cultural ecology with language at the center.