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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
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