"The original studies in this volume provide new insights into the history of medical discourse across centuries in both professional and lay texts. The central themes deal with changes in medical writing in various societal and cultural contexts in search for best practices in corpus pragmatics for future work. Some studies apply quantitative methods of corpus linguistics/Digital Humanities, others adopt a qualitative, discourse-analytical perspective, focusing on particular texts, authors or medical topics, or specific functionally-defined discourse forms such as narratives. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are mutually complementary and shed light on different aspects of historical medical discourse. The methodologies aim at establishing validity and reliability for pragmatic analysis, taking into account relevant contextual factors and insights from other fields, such as medical and social history, history of ideas, and science studies"--.

• Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Corpora, pragmatics, and historical medical discourse
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Main themes in the present volume
  • 3. Medical writing from a historical perspective
  • 4. Insights from corpora
  • References
• Part I. Tracing discursive changes
• Chapter 2. “A geography of names”: A genre analysis of nationality-driven names for venereal disease in seventeenth-century England
  • 1. Introduction
    • 1.1 Disease and place
  • 2. Material and methods
    • 2.1 Corpus
    • 2.2 Genre
  • 3. Results
    • 3.1 What words were used to refer to venereal disease?
    • 3.2 Genre distribution
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
    • Primary sources
    • Secondary sources
• Chapter 3. Medical topics and style from 1500 to 2018: A corpus-driven exploration
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Motivation
    • 2.1 Systematic comparison of all lexical features
    • 2.2 Advanced computational methods
    • 2.3 Sampling and representativeness
  • 3. Materials
    • 3.1 CEEM
    • 3.2 ARCHER Medical
    • 3.3 HIMERA
    • 3.4 PubMed Excerpt
    • 3.5 Overview of the complete data of our investigation
    • 3.6 Limitations of the data
  • 4. Methods
    • 4.1 Data preparation
    • 4.2 Supervised document classification
    • 4.3 Unsupervised topic modelling
    • 4.4 Unsupervised Conceptual Maps with Kernel Density Estimation
  • 5. Results
    • 5.1 Results of supervised document classification
    • 5.2 Results of unsupervised topic modelling
    • 5.3 Results of Unsupervised Conceptual Maps with Kernel Density Estimation
  • 6. Conclusion and future prospects
  • References
• Chapter 4. Medical discourse in Late Modern English: Insights from a multidisciplinary corpus of scientific journal articles
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The RSC 6.0
  • 3. Late Modern English medical texts in the RSC
    • 3.1 Authors of medical texts
    • 3.2 RSC texts with medical implications
    • 3.3 Linguistic features of medical articles
  • 4. Summary and conclusion
  • Funding
  • References
• Chapter 5. Survival or death: mine/my and thine/thy variation in Early Modern English medical writing
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Research context
  • 3. Material and method
  • 4. Quantitative results
  • 5. The microanalysis
  • 6. Summary and concluding remarks
  • References
    • Electronic resources
    • Secondary sources
• Chapter 6. Towards a local grammar of stance expression in Late Modern English medical writing
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Theoretical background
    • 2.1 Stance
    • 2.2 Local grammar
  • 3. Material and methods
    • 3.1 Corpus
    • 3.2 Method of analysis
  • 4. Frequency analysis
  • 5. Local grammar analysis
    • 5.1 Obtaining a sample
    • 5.2 From meaning elements to discourse functions
  • 6. Discussion and conclusion
  • References
    • Primary sources
    • Secondary sources
• Chapter 7. “Die Blumenzeit der Frau”: A corpus-based study of the development of medical references to menstruation in historical texts on herbology
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Referring expressions to menstruation in historical medical writing
  • 3. Corpus and annotation
    • 3.1 Annotating referring expressions to menstruation
    • 3.2 The impact of corpus design
  • 4. Corpus study
    • 4.1 Distribution and variants of references to menstruation
    • 4.2 Grammatical strategies to refer to menstruation
    • 4.3 Semiotic relation between denotation and terms
  • 5. Summary and discussion
  • References
• Part II. Changing functions, roles and representations
• Chapter 8. Language, labour and ideology: Constructing epistemologies of childbirth in the first three centuries of English-language midwifery texts (1540–1800)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. A brief history of midwifery and (textual) practice, 1540–1800
  • 3. Methodology
    • 3.1 Knowledge, ideology and Critical Discourse Analysis
    • 3.2 Creating a corpus of early midwifery texts (1540–1800)
  • 4. An overview of language and ideology in the prefatory material
    • 4.1 The value and audience of knowledge dissemination
    • 4.2 Authors as the curators of knowledge
  • 5. Concluding remarks
  • References
  • Appendix
• Chapter 9. Unhappy patients and eminent physicians: The representation of patients and practitioners in Late Modern English medical writing
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Medicine, practitioners and patients in eighteenth-century England
  • 3. Evaluating representations by collocation analysis
  • 4. Data and method
    • 4.1 The Corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts
    • 4.2 Methods
  • 5. Distribution of headwords and semantic categorisation of collocates
  • 6. Semantic categorization of collocates for patient
  • 7. Semantic categorisation of collocates for physicians, surgeons and apothecaries
  • 8. Discussion and conclusion
  • References
• Chapter 10. The discursive dynamics of personal experience narratives and medical advice in 18th-century British consultation letters: The case of Dr. William Cullen
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Orientation and evaluation in personal experience narratives
  • 3. The case of Dr. William Cullen’s epistolary collection
    • 3.1 Aims and method
    • 3.2 Materials
    • 3.3 Procedure
  • 4. Results and discussion
    • 4.1 The referential functions of the PENs
    • 4.2 The evaluative functions of the PENs
  • 5. Cullen’s medical responses: Discourse strategies
  • 6. Concluding remarks
  • References
• Chapter 11. Communicating authority: Self-mentions in Early Modern English medical narratives (1500–1700)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Material and methods
  • 3. Treatment narratives
  • 4. Narratives of discovery
  • 5. Discussion
  • 6. Conclusion
  • References
    • Electronic resources
    • Texts cited
    • Secondary sources
• Chapter 12. How old is old?: The discourse of “good” ageing in nineteenth-century self-help medical texts
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Data and sources
  • 3. Methods
  • 4. Analysis
    • 4.1 Comparing the four sample texts
    • 4.2 Defining old age
    • 4.3 The ailments of old age and their remedies
  • 5. Discussion of findings
  • 6. Conclusions, limits and developments
  • References
    • Primary sources
    • Secondary sources
• Chapter 13. The popularization of learned medicine in late seventeenth-century England: Accommodating translation strategies and textual aspects
  • 1. Background
  • 2. Aims, corpus and methods
  • 3. Results and discussion
    • 3.1 Macro-textual and discursive elements
    • 3.2 Translation procedures and popularization
    • 3.3 Diatypic variation and translator attitude
  • 4. Conclusions
  • References
    • Primary sources
    • Secondary sources
• Index