Abstract
Medical consulting by letter was a common practice in eighteenth-century Britain since physical examination was still far from being an established diagnostic tool. Despite what this epistolary practice testifies of the importance of illness narratives in historical medical discourse, scant attention has been devoted to their discursive representations. This chapter examines the discursive dynamics of medical consulting letters, drawing on the Labovian framework and the RIAS (Roter Interaction Analysis System) method for coding medical interaction. Discourse analysis is performed on a dataset of sample letters from Dr. Cullen’s (1710–1790) collection to unpack the referential and evaluative functions of narratives by patients, and Cullen’s discourse strategies for building doctor-patient relationship. Results from the case study highlight the historical significance of mediating and interpreting illness narratives according to the Enlightenment symptom-based model.
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