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Joan Grundy has forty years' experience as a midwife and practice nurse. During thirty of these years, she has researched her own family history and has been involved with several F.H. Societies. Her publication is intended to help fellow family historians understand medical terms that are found in parish registers, death certificates and 18thC and 19thC books.

The observations of early medical men were very thorough as they tried to determine the cause of diseases. They listed every symptom the patients described and compared them with their colleagues' cases.. However, despite being very good at recognising symptoms they had little understanding of the causes and had relatively few effective treatments to offer.

For many of the diseases described in this. Dictionary, she has also given an outline of the symptoms and sometimes gory sufferings of our ancestors. Flesh is put on the bones of our forebears and gives an insight into their lives, social conditions and deaths.