Historical Medical Discourse

Corpus Linguistic Perspectives

Gavin Brookes, Niall Curry, Tony McEnery, Emma Putland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040438688
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection showcases original research highlighting innovations in the application of corpus linguistic methods to the study of English historical medical discourse.

The volume builds on recent work expanding the contours of health communication research to extend to medical texts of the past, whose preservation allows for a clearer understanding of changes to medical knowledge and practices over time through their production, reception, and use. Chapters explore how corpus linguistic methods allow for a critical examination of how this past medical knowledge is mediated through language across a diverse range of health issues, time periods, textual genres, and sociocultural contexts. While focusing on the English language, the collection demonstrates a point of entry for future work applying corpus linguistic methodologies to historical medical texts more broadly across other languages, periods, and texts to continue growing this burgeoning area of research.

This book will be of interest to scholars in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, medical humanities, and historical linguistics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Editors
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Corpora and the Study of Historical Medical Discourse
• 2 From ‘I Tried a Purge’ to ‘Experimental Intervention’: A Corpus-Based Discourse Study of Depersonalisation as a Conceptual Strategy in Medical Writing from 1700 to the Present
• 3 Patterns of Change in Late Modern English Microbiology Texts
• 4 The Adaptation of Medical Knowledge in Late-seventeenth– and Early-eighteenth-century Manuscript Household Books
• 5 Gender-Based Evidence of Modalisation and Modulation Strategies in Nineteenth-century Institution English Recipes
• 6 The Role of Personal Pronouns to Express Interpersonality in Women’s Recipe Collections
• 7 When People Overload The/Their Stomach(s): Non-verbal Plural Number Agreement and Generic Reference in Early and Late Modern Medical Discourse
• 8 Sensory Language as a Gateway to Knowledge and Evidence in Early Modern English Midwifery Writing (1540–1800): On Verbs of Tactile Perception
• 9 Midwifery and Medical Writing in Eighteenth-century British Reference Works: A Historical and Diachronic Corpus-Based Study
• 10 Advertising a Proprietary Medicine: Daffy’s Elixir Salutis in Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Advertisements
• 11 Anti-Vaccination Discourse in Victorian England: Key Semantic Domains and Parallels with Present-Day Anti-Vaccination Arguments
• Index