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Part of
Discourses on the Edges of Life
Edited by Vicent Salvador †, Adéla Kotátková and Ignasi Clemente
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 26] 2020
► pp. 97–110

Rhetoric of death in clinical case reports and clinical tales

 | Universitat Jaume I
Death is a taboo in Western civilization. Even healthcare fields, which are strongly familiar with the end of life, cannot avoid the tendency to soften the impact caused by talking or writing about death. Like anyone else, healthcare professionals who publish clinical case reports (ccr) tend to use euphemisms. They also have the option to use a technical lexicon that could be perceived as a range of euphemistic expressions. In this chapter we review the place of death in this professional genre. We also compare several aspects of the rhetoric of death in ccr and clinical tales. The latter, though frequently written by medical authors, are intended for a non-specialized public and have a literary communicative purpose.
Keywords: death, rhetoric, clinical case report, euphemism, taboo, clinical tale and Oliver Sacks
Article outline
  • 1.Clinical case reports and clinical tales
  • 2.The taboo of death
  • 3.The reference to death in health settings
  • 4.Reporting death in clinical case reports
  • 5.Telling of death in clinical tales
  • References
  • Corpora cited
Published online: 9 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.26.07kot
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