Abstract
This chapter compares the representations of patients and doctors in eighteenth-century English in the corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT). The representations are surveyed by collocation analysis in order to reveal shared beliefs linked with the social groups. Rather than individual collocates, the focus is on semantic preference and semantic prosody, which enable the analysis of abstract meanings and discourse-pragmatic functions of terms. Results indicate that physicians and surgeons are typically associated with education and professional expertise, and their social identity generally represents positive semantic prosody. By contrast, apothecaries are identified more negatively, displaying their lower status within the medical profession. Patients are often viewed as mere objects of treatment and their physical state is emphasised. However, patients receive sympathy as well, reflecting the philanthropic spirit of the era.
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