Cover not available
Part of
Corpora and the Changing Society: Studies in the evolution of English
Edited by Paula Rautionaho, Arja Nurmi and Juhani Klemola
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 96] 2020
► pp. 57–78

Finding evidence for a changing society

A collocational study of medical discourse in 1500–1800

| University of Helsinki
This chapter examines, with the help of collocation analysis, how patients were viewed in medical texts from 1500 to 1800. Previous studies have suggested that this period witnessed considerable changes in society. The field of medicine also underwent major developments during this time, but linguistic analyses have been lacking. Two corpora were used in the study: the Corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts and the Corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts, together totaling over 4.2 million words. The results indicate a development from the patient as an object of various treatments and cures in the early modern period to patient as experiencer in the late modern period. The growing importance of hospitals and public health in the latter era also emerges from the results.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Materials and method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1The Corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts (1500–1700)
    • 4.2The Corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts (1700–1800)
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.96.03rat
References (40)
References
Corpora and software
AntConc = Anthony, Laurence. 2014. AntConc (Version 3.4.3) [Computer Software]. Tokyo: Waseda University. <[URL]>
EMEMT = Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus [CD-rom]. 2010. Compiled by Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta, Martti Mäkinen, Turo Hiltunen, Ville Marttila, Maura Ratia, Carla & Jukka Tyrkkö. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
LMEMT = Late Modern English Medical Texts. Corpus [CD-rom]. 2019. Compiled by Irma Taavitsainen, Turo Hiltunen, Anu Lehto, Ville Marttila, Päivi Pahta, Maura Ratia, Carla Suhr & Jukka Tyrkkö. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
VARD = Variant Detector, version 2.3.
Other references
Atkinson, Dwight. 1992. The evolution of medical research writing from 1735 to 1985: The case of the Edinburgh Medical Journal. Applied Linguistics 13(4): 337–374. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barnbrook, Geoff, Mason, Oliver & Krishnamurthy, Ramesh. 2013. Collocation and language theory: Recent developments. In Collocation: Applications and Implications, 147–173. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baron, Alistair & Rayson, Paul. 2009. Automatic standardization of texts containing spelling variation: How much training data do you need? In Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference, CL2009, University of Liverpool, UK, 20–23 July 2009, Michaela Mahlberg, Victorina González-Díaz & Catherine Smith (eds). Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press. <[URL]> (7 November 2019).
Biber, Douglas & Conrad, Susan. 1999. Lexical bundles in conversation and academic prose. In Out of Corpora: Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson, Hilde Hasselgård & Signe Oksefjell (eds), 181–190. Amsterdam: Atlanta.Google Scholar
Brezina, Vaclav, McEnery, Tony & Wattam, Stephen. 2015. Collocations in context: A new perspective on collocation networks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20(2): 139–173. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Michael. 2011. Polite and ornamental knowledge: Medicine and the world of letters. In Performing Medicine: Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c. 1760–1850, 48–81. Manchester: Manchester University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Church, Kenneth W. & Hanks, Patrick. 1990. Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography. Computational Linguistics 16(1): 22–29.Google Scholar
Durrant, Philip & Doherty, Alice. 2010. Are high-frequency collocations psychologically real? Investigating the thesis of collocational priming. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 6(2): 125–155. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evert, Stefan. 2005. The Statistics of Word Cooccurrences: Word Pairs and Collocations. PhD dissertation, University of Stuttgart. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gries, Stefan T. 2013. 50-something years of work on collocations: What is or should be next…. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 18(1): 137–165. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gross, Alan G., Harmon, Joseph E. & Reidy, Michael S. 2002. Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Hiltunen, Turo. 2010. Category 6. Philosophical Transactions. In Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies, Irma Taavitsainen & Päivi Pahta (eds), 127–131. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam. 1996. Which words are particularly characteristic of a text? A survey of statistical approaches. In Language Engineering for Document Analysis and Recognition, Brighton, England, April. AISB Workshop Series, 33–40.Google Scholar
Klein, Lawrence. 2002. Politeness and the interpretation of the British eighteenth century. The Historical Journal 45(4): 869–898. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lehto, Anu, Baron, Alistair, Ratia, Maura & Rayson, Paul. 2010. Improving the precision of corpus methods: The standardized version of Early Modern English Medical Texts. In Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies, Irma Taavitsainen & Päivi Pahta (eds), 279–290. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lehto, Anu. 2019. Public health. In Late Modern English Medical Texts: Writing Medicine in the Eighteenth Century, Irma Taavitsainen & Turo Hiltunen (eds), 307–315. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Louw, Bill. 1993. Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, Mona Baker, Gill Francis, John Sinclair & Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds), 157–176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McEnery, Tony & Hardie, Andrew. 2013. The history of corpus linguistics. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics, Keith Allan (ed.), 727–746. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mikkeli, Heikki & Marttila, Ville. 2010. Change and continuity in early modern medicine (1500–1700). In Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies, Irma Taavitsainen & Päivi Pahta (eds), 13–27. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu & Tissari, Heli. 2010. Contextualising eighteenth-century politeness: Social distinction and metaphorical levelling. In Eighteenth-century English: Ideology and Change, Raymond Hickey (ed.), 133–158. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nilsson Björkenstam, Kristina, Gustafson Capková, Sofia & Wirén, Mats. 2014. The Stockholm University Strindberg Corpus: Content and possibilities. In Strindberg on International Stages/Strindberg in Translation, Roland Lysell (ed.), 21–40. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
OED Online. 2018. <[URL]> (December 27, 2018). Oxford: OUP.
Pahta, Päivi. 2019. Midwifery. In Late Modern English Medical Texts: Writing Medicine in the Eighteenth Century, Irma Taavitsainen & Turo Hiltunen (eds), 271–278. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pahta, Päivi & Ratia, Maura. 2010. Category 2. Treatises on specific topics. In Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies, Irma Taavitsainen & Päivi Pahta (eds), 73–99. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pahta, Päivi & Taavitsainen, Irma. 2010. Introducing Early Modern English Medical Texts. In Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies, Irma Taavitsainen & Päivi Pahta (eds), 1–7. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pollach, Irene. 2012. Taming textual data: The contribution of corpus linguistics to computer-aided text analysis. Organizational Research Methods 15(2): 263–287. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Porter, Roy. 1985. Lay medical knowledge in the eighteenth century: The evidence of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Medical History 29: 138–168. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1986. Laymen, doctors and medical knowledge in the eighteenth century: The evidence of the Gentleman's Magazine. In Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-industrial Society, Roy Porter (ed.), 283–314. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1991. Cleaning up the great wen: Public health in eighteenth-century London. Medical History Supplement 11: 61–75. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ratia, Maura. 2019. Diseases. In Late Modern English Medical Texts: Writing Medicine in the Eighteenth Century, Irma Taavitsainen & Turo Hiltunen (eds), 243–249. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stubbs, Michael. 1995. Collocations and semantic profiles: On the cause of the trouble with quantitative studies. Functions of Language 2(1): 23–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma. 2011. Medical case reports and scientific thought-styles. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 17: 75–98.Google Scholar
. 2019. General periodical: The Gentleman’s Magazine. In Late Modern English Medical Texts: Writing Medicine in the Eighteenth Century, Irma Taavitsainen & Turo Hiltunen (eds), 327–336. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma & Tyrkkö, Jukka. 2010. Category 1. General treatises and textbooks. In Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies, Irma Taavitsainen & Päivi Pahta (eds), 65–72. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma, Hiltunen, Turo, Lehto, Anu, Marttila, Ville, Ratia, Maura, Pahta, Päivi & Tyrkkö, Jukka. 2014. Late Modern English Medical Texts 1700–1800: A corpus for analysing eighteenth-century medical English. ICAME Journal 38(1): 137–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wales, Katie. 1996. Personal Pronouns in Present-day English. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Lehto, Anu
2022. Chapter 9. Unhappy patients and eminent physicians. In Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 330], ► pp. 203 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.