Rhetoric of death in clinical case reports and clinical
tales
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.
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
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