A valedictorian is the person who achieves the highest grade point average in a cohort of students — most often a high school class. Particularly around graduation time, you’re apt to hear the word “valedictorian” here and there. But you probably won’t hear about any “valetudinarians.”
A valetudinarian is someone who’s very concerned with their health. Very, VERY concerned. Valetudinarians might seem like hypochondriacs, but really they’re quite different. Hypochondriacs always think they’re sick with something even when they aren’t. Valetudinarians, conversely, are obsessive about avoiding illness of any sort.
William Dampier was an explorer in the late 1600s; he was the first person to sail around the world three times, the first Englishman to set foot in numerous parts of Australia, and from time to time he was even a pirate. On one of his voyages he rescued Alexander Selkirk, who had been a member of Dampier’s crew on an earlier voyage but had been stranded on an island after a wreck; Selkirk was probably the inspiration for “Robinson Crusoe.”
In addition to all his adventures, Dampier also contributed to the botany and biology of the day by cataloguing the plants, animals, people, and terrain he found in the places he explored. When he returned to England in 1703 he published “A New Voyage Round the World”, in which he wrote: “Many of our English Valetudinarians have gone from Jamaica … to the I. Caimanes … to live wholly upon Turtle that abound there.” he was talking about the Cayman Islands; three Caribbean islands claimed by England that had become the place to go to recover from whatever ailed you — if you had plenty of money, that is.
The word “valetudinarian” was in fairly common use throughout the 1700s. Back then it was a pretty good idea to try to keep yourself healthy, given what the “doctors” of the era would do to try to cure you. The “Gentleman’s Magazine” in 1787 observed that “Every one knows how hard a task it is to cure a valetudinarian.” The word appeared sometime in the 1500s and is borrowed from the Latin word “valetudinarius,” which strangely enough has almost an opposite meaning: “in ill health.”
