The linguistic construction of scientificality in early Swedish medical texts

Abstract

The chapter presents an analysis of the linguistic construction of scientificality in twelve medical articles published in the Transactions of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences between 1750 and 1769. By means of a detailed analysis of some early medical texts in Swedish, the chapter explores how 18th-century medical professionals textually created scientificality. The analytical framework can be described as socio-constructivist, which means that “scientificality” is regarded as a construction at different levels, or within different layers, of texts: a cognitive, a social and a societal layer. The description of the corpus studied is followed by three results sections. The first section focuses on the cognitive content of the texts and how it is structured, that is, on textual features that can primarily be linked to the cognitive layer. The second considers a number of linguistic phenomena (references, names and pronouns) that can be related to the social layer. The third examines how, in their texts, authors constructed a scientific role in society for the group to which they belonged. In the concluding section, a developmental perspective is applied to the 18th-century texts studied, and the findings are related to different stages in the development of medical science.