You Could Look It Up (53 page)

(1)  Expert opinion was divided over whether homosexuality was pathological;

(2)  Many homosexuals seemed satisfied with their own sexual orientation;

(3)  But there are also many homosexuals who want to change their orientation;

(4)  It is possible to change the sexual orientation of some proportion of homosexuals.

Convinced that these findings were inconsistent with other pathologies, they ended by unanimously recommending that homosexuality be removed from the list of mental illnesses. In 1973, just four years after Stonewall, the professional consensus had changed: the sixth printing of
DSM-II
removed homosexuality from the list of diseases. Millions of “sick” people were instantly pronounced healthy.

Revision of the manual continues, and controversies about the classification system continue to grow.
DSM-5
appeared in May 2013, the work of fifteen years by thirteen subcommittees, each working on its own subspecialty. The page count reached 947, and again the number of ailments—potentially treatable, and therefore potentially profitable—rose: the count now tops three hundred, although changes to the classification
system make it impossible to come up with a precise number. New diagnoses include hoarding disorder, restless leg syndrome, and social communication disorder. Meanwhile, Asperger’s syndrome has dissolved into a more general “autism spectrum disorder,” leaving millions of families wondering what that will mean for the treatment of their children.

Some find the whole enterprise pointless. “Has there ever been a task more futile,” asked writer L. J. Davis about the
DSM
, “than the attempt to encompass, in the work of a single lifetime, let alone in a single work, the whole of human experience? … Not even Shakespeare could manage it.” The reductio ad absurdum leads inevitably to the conclusion that “human life is a form of mental illness.” Davis’s cynical interpretation is that the
DSM
is a “catalogue,” and “The merchandise consists of the psychiatric disorders described therein, the customers are the therapists, and this may be the only catalogue in the world that actually makes its customers money: each disorder, no matter how trivial, is accompanied by a billing code, enabling the therapist to fill out the relevant insurance form and receive an agreed upon reward.”
17

Gray’s Anatomy
and the
DSM
seem to be worlds apart. One is concerned with the body, the other with the mind; one tells a story of Victorian positivism, the other of postmodern insecurity about the limits of our knowledge. Both, though, reveal the power exercised by the classifying function of the reference book. Gray and the nearly forgotten Carter got to determine how generations of physicians approached the human body, and their decisions have shaped the thinking of medical professionals for a century and a half. The
DSM
, too, has been shaping thinking, but it has been easier to see the work that went into shaping it, and thus easier to see how contingent many of its judgments are. Both books offer an opportunity to think about how much depends on the decisions made by the writers of our handbooks.

CHAPTER
20 ½

INCOMPLETE AND ABANDONED PROJECTS

In the back alleys of intellectual history are scattered the abandoned wrecks of would-be dictionaries and encyclopedias. When publishing projects stretch out over decades, money runs out, editors die, publishers go out of business, manuscripts burn, wars intervene. The remarkable thing isn't that some works peter out before they're finished; more amazing is that any of these works ever make it to completion.

Some books never make it past the gleam-in-the-author's-eye stage. Read literary biography and you'll find no end of people who considered writing a dictionary or encyclopedia. Many poets thought about trying their hand at lexicography—only natural for people who devote their lives to language—but few have finished. Alexander Pope and Walt Whitman both dreamed of being lexicographers, but only a few notes survive of their planned dictionaries.
1
Oliver Goldsmith—novelist, poet, playwright, historian, and journalist—“for some time … entertained the project of publishing a ‘Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences' ” featuring contributions from friends including Samuel Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds—but, despite the progress he made on the proposals, he died before publishing any of it. One scholar discovered evidence of fifty-four English dictionaries that were conceived but abandoned between just 1755 and 1828.
2

Others got a little further. Oxford's Bodleian Library holds tantalizing evidence of a dictionary from around 1570, which, had it been completed, would have been the first monolingual English dictionary, coming decades before Cawdrey's.
3
Franz Fügner began a
Lexicon Livianum
but called it quits after the letter
B
because he could not raise enough money.
4
In 1793, the Portuguese Academy published the first volume of the
Diccionario da lingoa portugueza
. This promised to put the
Portuguese language on the same academic foundation as French, Italian, and Spanish, but it was abandoned after
A
. The Portuguese would have to wait until 2001 for a serious academic dictionary. Elsewhere on the Iberian peninsula, Rufino José Cuervo worked on a
Diccionario de construcción y régimen de la lengua castellana
, more comprehensive than any other Spanish dictionary—the preposition
a
alone fills twenty-seven pages. But the project died after 2,270 pages took Cuervo only as far as the letter
D
.
5
A French
Dictionnaire historique
released volume 1 (
a
–
actualité
) in 1865 and started on volume 2 in 1878; at that rate they would have finished in 2,990 years. Perhaps it is just as well that they gave up in 1894, having completed only
A
.
6

Some efforts got pretty far along before something caused them to fall apart. The seventeenth-century French encyclopedist Jean Magnon worked on
La Science universelle
, an encyclopedia in verse—around ten thousand lines, roughly the length of
Paradise Lost
—but he never finished it. Perhaps we need not agonize over the loss; one nineteenth-century source calls him “Jean Magnon, poëte français très-médiocre,” a description unlikely to need translation.
7
Vincenzo Coronelli, a Venetian monk and cartographer at the beginning of the eighteenth century, planned a
Biblioteca universale sacro-profana, antico-moderna
in forty or forty-five folio volumes. Had it been completed, it would have been among the first major encyclopedias arranged entirely in alphabetical order—but funds dried up when Coronelli's manuscript had reached
M
. Just the first seven volumes—covering
A
,
B
, and part of
C
—appeared in print between 1701 and 1706; the remainder has never been published.

One of the grandest of the abandoned wrecks is the
Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste
, or
Universal Encyclopedia of the Sciences and the Arts
. It was begun in 1818 and would have been one of the greatest encyclopedic projects of all time. It took most of the century: in 1889, seventy-one years after publication began, volume 167 appeared. And yet this was still less than half of its projected size. The team that devoted seven decades to the project managed to finish only the entries for
A
through
Ligatur
, and then
O
through
Phyxios
—the rest of the alphabet was untouched.
8

A few dictionaries were actually finished, or nearly so, but never saw the light of day. Fernando del Rosal completed his
Origen y etymologia
de todos los vocablos originales de la lengua Castellana
in 1601. But it was never printed, and the handwritten copy remains in the archives of Madrid's Biblioteca Nacional. Matthias Moth did virtually all the work on an imposing Danish dictionary between 1680 and 1717, producing more than sixty folio volumes in manuscript, but could not push it across the finish line; the work has never been published.
9
Ilyn Fedorovich Kopievskii compiled a more or less complete
Nomenclator in lingua latina, germanica et russica
—a trilingual dictionary of Latin, German, and Russian—in 1700, but he left it unpublished at the time of his death.

Shake-ups in the publishing economy, coming from both the rise of electronic publication and the collapse of library budgets, have caused some projects to sputter to a halt. Literary scholars depend on the
Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature
or
CBEL
, which first appeared between 1940 and 1957, followed by a
New
edition—known as the
NCBEL
—between 1969 and 1977. At the end of the twentieth century a third edition was planned: thousands of contributors were lined up and thousands of contracts signed. (I was tapped for
Boswell, James
and
Johnson, Samuel
.) The volumes were worked on independently, and volume 4, covering the nineteenth century, appeared in 1999, to mostly good reviews. But between the issuing of the contracts and the delivery of the finished typescripts, the bottom fell out of print reference publishing. Cambridge University Press realized it could not sell enough hard-copy volumes, and it saw no way to recover its costs on an online version. All the contributors were released from their contracts, the project was scrapped, and volume 4 remains orphaned in the world's libraries, doomed never to sit between volumes 3 and 5.

Politics can also kill a reference work. The
Brockhaus-Efron entsiklopedicheskii Slovar
came out in Russia between 1890 and 1907, after which a revised
Novyi entsiklopedicheskii Slovar
was planned. That project got under way in 1912, but this revolutionary decade was not a good time for reference publishing, especially for an old-fashioned reflection of the czarist world. Five years after the first volume appeared, the encyclopedia had reached twenty-nine volumes and the letter
O
. But the October Revolution of 1917 meant the end of the
Novyi entsiklopedicheskii
.
10

A few abandoned projects are especially tantalizing because they might have been works of genius. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the towering intellects of the early nineteenth century, provided the introductory treatise to what was going to be a trailblazing
Encyclopædia Metropolitana
in 1817, but it was just another of the utopian dreams that Coleridge entertained over the course of his career, and he withdrew.
11
Just as lamentable is the loss of W. E. B. Du Bois's proposed
Encyclopædia Africana
, a “comprehensive compendium of ‘scientific' knowledge about the history, cultures, and social institutions of people of African descent: of Africans in the Old World, African Americans in the New World, and persons of African descent who had risen to prominence in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.” The project occupied Du Bois's mind for nearly half a century.
12
He wrote to dozens of experts, hoping to establish a pair of editorial boards—“One Hundred Negro Americans, African and West Indian Scholars,” along with a second panel of white advisers—though “the real work,” he told a friend, “I want done by Negroes.”
13
Nearly everyone he asked said yes, and progress was expected to be rapid. Printed stationery promised the first volume in 1913, “the Jubilee of Emancipation in America and the Tercentenary of the Landing of the Negro,” with four more volumes coming out over the next four years. But the funding never materialized. Du Bois tried again during the Great Depression, but progress was even harder then.
14
A one-volume project on this plan—
Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience
, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates—finally appeared in 1999, but for all its value, it's hard not to lament the lost
Africana
by a father of African studies.

CHAPTER
21

THE FOUNDATION STONE

Library Catalogs