English Medical Texts Research Articles

Editing Middle English Medical Manuscripts : The Case of Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 509

It has been pointed out that the editing of a scientific treatise should be “an extended and challenging exercise in judgment, requiring an earnest commitment to scholarship” (Keiser 1998: 110). In the present article, the challenges and steps involved in the process of editing a specific Middle English medical text, G.U.L. MS Hunter 509, are dealt with. After a brief introduction to the manuscript, the stages previous to editing are discussed. These include transcription, of which the main difficulties are addressed and possible ways to overcome them put forward, lemmatisation and morphological tagging. Then, the two types of edition that have been carried out, printed and electronic, are presented. A comment on the glossary and list of lemmas closes the article.

Woman’s Milk in Anglo-Saxon and Later Medieval Medical Texts

Women’s early history provides a long tradition of attested textual evidence associating female bodily secretions with impurity, particularly in relation to menstruation, childbirth, and sexual intercourse. But we notice among early medical texts the mention of another female secretion, woman’s milk, and its use as a healing ingredient in medical recipes. This paper argues that textual sources of woman’s milk as a female secretion in this early tradition demonstrate a complex mixture of sometimes conflicting values, not all of which were unpleasant, nor irrational. The paper first describes how woman’s milk as a healing ingredient is presented in Anglo-Saxon medical texts and compares that presentation to the description and treatment of woman’s milk in a sampling of later English medieval medical texts. The texts themselves are rich in their demonstration of the use of women’s bodies for the preparation of medicinal products, and for this reason, the descriptive aspects of this paper are meant to offer one aspect of women’s history that is still widely unknown.

Dun, Oxa and Pliny the Great Physician: Attribution and Authority in Old English Medical Texts

Although English vernacular medicine of the late ninth to twelfth centuries draws heavily upon the classical and sub-classical tradition, classical authorities are almost never cited. In fact, citations of any kind are very rare, and the majority of authorities cited in texts compiled before the Norman Conquest are themselves English. Only in the twelfth century are Galen and Hippocrates mentioned for the first time. This suggests a rather self-sufficient medical community in England, with limited historical awareness or contact with wider developments, at least until new Latin medical texts came in from the continent in the eleventh century.

A Comparison between the Difficulty Level (Readability) of English Medical Texts and Their Persian Translations

Using foreign written materials in Iran's healthcare industry is very common, but it seems that there is a significant difference between the difficulty level of original texts and their corresponding translations. This study compares the readability level of English medical texts and their corresponding Persian translations. In this study, 50 translated booklets and their corresponding texts in English were assessed – all these booklets are translated versions of BMA publications and kept in Iran's National Library. Comparisons of these texts were made using Gunning Fog Index and SMOG Readability Index Grade. Then, significant difference between the data obtained from English medical texts and their Persian translations were made. A significant difference was observed between the number of multi-syllables words and readability scores in English medical texts and their corresponding Persian texts, but no significant difference was observed between the number of words and sentences in these two groups. Therefore, it is necessary to omit needless words, use fewer complex (multi-syllabuses) words, and use shorter sentences.

A Corpus-Based Study of Cohesion in English Medical Texts and its Chinese Translation

Cohesion as an indispensable linguistic feature in discourse analysis and translation has aroused many researchers’ interest. To explore the regularity in shifting cohesive devices from English into Chinese our study was designed to analyze the similarities and differences of cohesive devices between English medical texts (EMTs) and their Chinese translation texts (CTTs). A parallel corpus consisting of 15 EMTs and 15 CTTs was established, each type of cohesive devices was identified, and paired t-test was run for statistic analysis. We have revealed that both EMTs and CTTS share more similarities than differences in the use of cohesive devices; the differences between them only exist in the employment of reference in terms of occurrence frequencies; the majority of cohesive devices are maintained in Chinese translation for precision, clarity and logicality. Our study will not only help medical students and medical workers but also shed light on EMP teaching and research.

"Of Medicineз Sedatyueз": Some Notes on Adjective Position and Oral Register in Middle English Medical Texts

"Of Medicineз Sedatyueз": Some Notes on Adjective Position and Oral Register in Middle English Medical Texts The position of adjectives in the English Noun Phrase is regarded as something quite fixed and pertaining to the level of syntax rather than to any other. In previous studies (Moskowich 2002; Moskowich - Crespo 2002; Lareo - Moskowich 2009), it has been shown, however, that there seem to be some other extra-syntactic variables at stake determining word-order patterns. This paper aims at analysing the word-order patterns of adjectives in the emerging scientific writing in the Middle Ages, particularly in medical texts written in English. To this end, several texts contained in MEMT (Middle English Medical Texts) will be analysed. As a first approach, samples belonging to the three different traditions included in the Corpus will be considered. This examination of samples from a surgical text, a specialised one and a remedy book will also help obtain some conclusions regarding the evolution in the use of the so called French-type adjectives in the language.

Middle English Medical Recipes: A Metadiscursive Approach

Middle English Medical Recipes: A Metadiscursive Approach This paper seeks to explore Middle English medical recipes from a metadiscursive perspective. This study will draw on Hyland's (2005) metadiscourse model where code glosses, endophoric markers, evidentials, frame markers and transition markers are included in the interactive dimension, and attitude markers, boosters, engagement markers, hedges and self mention are to be found within interactional metadiscourse. I shall apply this framework for the identification and analysis of data in a corpus which comprises a selection of recipes taken from both Middle English Medical Texts (Taavitsainen - Pahta - Mäkinen 2005) and The corpus of early English recipes. The metadiscursive approach to the study of medical recipes will allow us to establish links between authors, texts and audience of the recipe genre and, consequently, to affirm their status as products of social engagement.

The pragmatics of and-conjunctives in Middle English medical recipes

The present paper seeks to explore the multiple meanings of the conjunction and in Middle English medical recipes. The corpus used contains a total number of 6,300 words, mainly from the Middle English Medical Texts compiled by Taavitsainen, Pahta and Mäkinen (2005). The framework of analysis is Relevance Theory as in Sperber and Wilson (1995). Jucker (1993), Blakemore and Carston (1999), and Carston (2002) have proved that this theory can neatly describe the various functions and meanings of discourse markers, such as and, but and well. As I show in the conclusion, and constructions must be studied in detail so that we may identify their particular meaning, which is mostly context-dependent rather than semantically constrained. By doing so, we will have a better understanding of texts and this will benefit the comprehension of medieval English. Whether the meanings of and occur similarly in other genres is left for a future, contrastive analysis.

The pragmatics of <I>and</I>-conjunctives in Middle English medical recipes<BR> A Relevance Theory description

The present paper seeks to explore the multiple meanings of the conjunction and in Middle English medical recipes. The corpus used contains a total number of 6,300 words, mainly from the Middle English Medical Texts compiled by Taavitsainen, Pahta and Makinen (2005). The framework of analysis is Relevance Theory as in Sperber and Wilson (1995). Jucker (1993), Blakemore and Carston (1999), and Carston (2002) have proved that this theory can neatly describe the various functions and meanings of discourse markers, such as and, but and well. As I show in the conclusion, and constructions must be studied in detail so that we may identify their particular meaning, which is mostly context-dependent rather than semantically constrained. By doing so, we will have a better understanding of texts and this will benefit the comprehension of medieval English. Whether the meanings of and occur similarly in other genres is left for a future, contrastive analysis.

Book Review: Middle English Medical Texts

Book Review: Middle English Medical Texts

Metaphorical radiodiagnostic terms

The purpose of this article is to identify and classify metaphorical sign terms in the field of abdominal radiodiagnostic imaging. A 1,000,000 word electronic corpus of English and Spanish medical texts was used to compile an extensive list of metaphorical designations for signs detected on radiological images. These terms were classified thematically and structurally and analyzed from the terminological perspective of logical motivation. The fundamental premise behind this research is the belief that a better knowledge of this type of terminology (both English and Spanish) can lead to a better understanding of the specialist’s perception of the prototypical image conjured by the metaphor.

Fast exact string pattern-matching algorithms adapted to the characteristics of the medical language.

The authors consider the problem of exact string pattern matching using algorithms that do not require any preprocessing. To choose the most appropriate algorithm, distinctive features of the medical language must be taken into account. The characteristics of medical language are emphasized in this regard, the best algorithm of those reviewed is proposed, and detailed evaluations of time complexity for processing medical texts are provided. The authors first illustrate and discuss the techniques of various string pattern-matching algorithms. Next, the source code and the behavior of representative exact string pattern-matching algorithms are presented in a comprehensive manner to promote their implementation. Detailed explanations of the use of various techniques to improve performance are given. Real-time measures of time complexity with English medical texts are presented. They lead to results distinct from those found in the computer science literature, which are typically computed with normally distributed texts. The Boyer-Moore-Horspool algorithm achieves the best overall results when used with medical texts. This algorithm usually performs at least twice as fast as the other algorithms tested. The time performance of exact string pattern matching can be greatly improved if an efficient algorithm is used. Considering the growing amount of text handled in the electronic patient record, it is worth implementing this efficient algorithm.

Historical terminology of eating disorders

Using a wide range of rare, early printed sources, including literary material, some of the first English language dictionaries, medical lexicons and medical texts, the historical origins, development and application of five terms relating to eating abnormalities are investigated. It is demonstrated that four of these, which are in current psychiatric usage, exhibited notable consistency of meaning and application over many centuries.

Automated translation of German to English medical text

The feasibility of automated translation of scientific and medical documents remains controversial. This report describes a minicomputer-based German-to-English translation system (TRANSOFT) that employs word order rearrangement followed by word-for-word translation and disambiguation based on context. This translation system was applied to a computer-readable version of Adler's Knochenkrankheiten (Bone Diseases), which contains 118,604 words, with 10,216 distinct words in 7,211 sentences averaging 16.4 words each. The translation required 2,791 word rearrangement formulas, 78 percent of which were first used in the first half of the document. There were 2,392 occurrences of 12 potentially ambiguous terms, of which only 18 (0.8 percent) were not resolvable from the immediate context. As foreign language medical documents become increasingly available in computer-readable form through computerized typesetting, electronic publishing, and improved optical character recognition equipment, automated translation systems may provide a rapid and inexpensive means of obtaining draft translations.