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Part of
Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse
Edited by Turo Hiltunen and Irma Taavitsainen
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 330] 2022
► pp. 203–228

Chapter 9
Unhappy patients and eminent physicians

The representation of patients and practitioners in Late Modern English medical writing

 | University of Helsinki
This chapter compares the representations of patients and doctors in eighteenth-century English in the corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT). The representations are surveyed by collocation analysis in order to reveal shared beliefs linked with the social groups. Rather than individual collocates, the focus is on semantic preference and semantic prosody, which enable the analysis of abstract meanings and discourse-pragmatic functions of terms. Results indicate that physicians and surgeons are typically associated with education and professional expertise, and their social identity generally represents positive semantic prosody. By contrast, apothecaries are identified more negatively, displaying their lower status within the medical profession. Patients are often viewed as mere objects of treatment and their physical state is emphasised. However, patients receive sympathy as well, reflecting the philanthropic spirit of the era.
Keywords: representation, collocation, semantic prosody, semantic preference, patient, surgeon, physician, apothecary
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Medicine, practitioners and patients in eighteenth-century England
  • 3.Evaluating representations by collocation analysis
  • 4.Data and method
    • 4.1The Corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts
    • 4.2Methods
  • 5.Distribution of headwords and semantic categorisation of collocates
  • 6.Semantic categorisation of collocates for patient
  • 7.Semantic categorisation of collocates for physicians, surgeons and apothecaries
  • 8.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.330.09leh
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