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Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse
Edited by Birte Bös and Lucia Kornexl
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 5] 2015
► pp. 135–160

Medical news in England 1665–1800 in journals for professional and lay audiences

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This article is based on three early periodicals: The Philosophical Transactions for the Royal Society (PT, 1665–), The Edinburgh Medical Journal (EMJ, 1733–), and The Gentleman’s Magazine (GM, 1731–). A broad and inclusive selection of unexplored texts comes from a period in which conventions of scientific and medical news discourse were being created and developed. In order to detect the lines of development in more detail, I performed a series of Keyword analyses (WordSmith) and complemented the study with qualitative assessment. A comparison of PT vs. other contemporary medical texts of the corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT) revealed features of the new science, e.g. observation has a high keyness score. The developments towards stricter professionalization and more public knowledge continue in professional journals. Keywords of the 18th century (GM vs. PT and GM vs. EMJ) reveal differences in lay practices as compared to professional writing. GM readership shared advice for distributing knowledge of new treatments and cures, and the ‘public good’ becomes prominent.

Keywords: keyword analysis, lay audience, medical writing, period style, private and public, professional audience
Published online: 24 July 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.5.06taa
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Bös, Birte
2017. Chapter 2. Of hopes and plans. In Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 6], ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo
Lonati, Elisabetta
2020. Chapter 10. Paratextual features in 18th-century medical writing. In The Dynamics of Text and Framing Phenomena [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 317], ► pp. 233 ff. DOI logo
Menzel, Katrin
2022. Chapter 4. Medical discourse in Late Modern English. In Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 330], ► pp. 79 ff. DOI logo

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