Historical Medical Discourse

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.

Gavin Brookes is Reader in Linguistics and UKRI Future Leader Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. Niall Curry is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Tony McEnery is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and English Language in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK, and Changjiang Chair at Xi'an Jiaotong University, China. Emma Putland is Senior Research Associate for the project 'Public Discourses of Dementia: Challenging stigma and promoting personhood', based in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK.

1. Corpora and the Study of Historical Medical Discourse - Gavin Brookes, Niall Curry, Tony McEnery and Emma Putland; 2. From "I Tried a Purge" to "Experimental Intervention": A Corpus-Based Discourse Study of Depersonalization as a Conceptual Strategy in Medical Writing from 1700 to the Present - Georg Marko; 3. Patterns of Change in Late Modern English Microbiology Texts - Katrin Menzel; 4. The Adaptation of Medical Knowledge in Late-seventeenth- and Early-eighteenth-century Manuscript Household Books - Giulia Rovelli; 5. Gender-Based Evidence of Modalisation and Modulation Strategies in Nineteenth-century Institution English Recipes - Francisco J. Alonso-Almeida; 6. The Role of Personal Pronouns to Express Interpersonality in Women's Recipe Collections - Isabel de la Cruz-Cabanillas; 7. When People Overload The/Their Stomach(s): Non-verbal Plural Number Agreement and Generic Reference in Early and Late Modern Medical Discourse - Karolina Rudnicka and Richard J. Whitt; 8. Sensory Language as a Gateway to Knowledge and Evidence in Early Modern English Midwifery Writing (1540-1800): On Verbs of Tactile Perception - Richard J. Whitt; 9. Midwifery and Medical Writing in 18th-century British Reference Works: A Historical and Diachronic Corpus-Based Study - Elisabetta Lonati; 10. Advertising a Proprietary Medicine: Daffy's Elixir Salutis in Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Advertisements - Carla Suhr; 11. Anti-Vaccination Discourse in Victorian England: Key Semantic Domains and Parallels with Present-Day Anti-Vaccination Arguments - Elena Semino, Derek Gatherer, Tara Coltman-Patel, William Dance, Alice Deignan and Claire Hardaker.