Thursday, October 7, 2010

Anotomy, etc. (for Anatomy, etc.)

The ankle bone's connected to the leg bone, the leg bone's connected to the knee bone, the knee bone's connected to the thigh bone ... now hear the word of the Lord! If you want to know about all the bones in the body and exactly how they connect, you'll want to take a look at Gray's Anatomy, something I'm sure most of you have done at one time or another—if not the MD-sanctioned reference book, then the Emmy-nominated TV show (which I should probably note is spelled with an E rather than an A). Henry Gray was born in England in 1827 and eventually appointed Lecturer on Anatomy at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London. He and a colleague, Henry Vandyke Carter, dissected unclaimed corpses from hospital and workhouse mortuaries for a year and a half, thanks to the Anatomy Act of 1832, an activity which helped form the basis of the medical textbook Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical. Gray died at the premature age of 34, but his landmark book has undergone numerous editions since then and is still in print today. We diagnosed several variations on today's typo in OhioLINK: six cases of Anotomy, two of Anatony, and one each of Anatamy and Amatomy. (There were none for Anotamy.) You can also try truncating these examples in order to pick up typos for words such as anatomical, but if you do, be aware that your results might include some foreign words or variant spellings, which may or may not accurately reflect what's on the piece in question.

(Bandapparat OSG und Fuß, von fibular, Grey's Anatomy, 1918, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

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