Chapter 8. Changing portrayals of medicine and patients in eighteenth-century medical writing

Abstract

This chapter turns the attention to three-word lexical bundles and aims to reveal repeated linguistic elements and text-external concepts in medical texts. The study is carried out in the corpus categories of public health and methods and additionally in the genre of case studies that are found across the corpus. The analysis applies a corpus-driven approach and assesses the functions of the word strings by categorising them into referential and textual bundles and stance expressions. The survey reveals various differences and diachronic changes in each of the corpus categories. Texts on public health concern the wellbeing of citizens and discuss medical matters on the social level. Texts on methods, in contrast, concentrate on medicines and the diseases of the patients, and case studies similarly focus on the patient and employ narrative structures. The bundles indicate novel practices in eighteenth-century medical writing, i.e. many bundles point to the increasing importance of observation especially in methods and case studies, and bundles related to statistical methods and quantification are found among the repeated constructions. Further, the bundles display new themes in medicine, e.g. texts on public health contain bundles that refer to the hospital movement and extend an understanding of hygiene. At the same time, the distribution of the functional categories is rather similar in the material, as referential bundles prevail followed by textual bundles and stance expressions, indicating many continuities in medical writing that stem from earlier periods.