Early Modern English Medical Texts

Corpus description and studies

Editors

Irma Taavitsainen | University of Helsinki

Päivi Pahta | University of Tampere

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027211774 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00

The corpus Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT) is the second component of the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing (CEEM), a three-part series of historical corpora of medical writing from 1375-1800. EMEMT contains a two-million word representative sample of the entire field of English medical writings that appeared in print between 1500 and 1700, and provides continuity to Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT), published on CD-ROM by John Benjamins in 2005.

The EMEMT corpus includes c. 230 texts, ranging from theoretical treatises rooted in academic traditions of medicine to popularized and utilitarian texts verging on household literature. The texts are grouped into six text categories that facilitate systematic research into the history of medical writing in its disciplinary context: general treatises and textbooks; treatises on specific topics; recipe collections and materia medica ; regimen and health guides; surgical treatises; and samples of the first scientific journal, the Philosophical Transactions.

EMEMT is released on CD-Rom with EMEMT Presenter, purpose-designed software by Raymond Hickey.

The corpus is published with a book, Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies, edited by Irma Taavitsainen & Päivi Pahta.

[Not in series, 160] 2010. xv, 370 pp. (incl. CD-Rom)

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/z.160

Table of Contents

Preface | pp. vii–viii

List of contributors | pp. ix–xii

List of abbreviations | pp. xiii–xiv

Conventions used in this book | pp. xv–xvi

Introducing Early Modern English Medical Texts

Päivi Pahta and Irma Taavitsainen | pp. 1–8

Part I. Background

Expanding the borders of knowledge

Irma Taavitsainen | pp. 11–12

Change and continuity in early modern medicine (1500–1700)

Heikki Mikkeli and Ville Marttila | pp. 13–28

Discourse and genre dynamics in early modern english medical writing

Irma Taavitsainen | pp. 29–54

Part II. Corpus description

The field of medical writing with fuzzy edges

Irma Taavitsainen and Jukka Tyrkkö | pp. 57–62

Corpus categories

Category 1: General treatises and textbooks

Irma Taavitsainen and Jukka Tyrkkö | pp. 65–72

Category 2: Treatises on specific topics

Päivi Pahta and Maura Ratia | pp. 73–100

Category 3: Recipe collections and materia medica

Ville Marttila | pp. 101–110

Category 4: Regimens and health guides

Carla Suhr | pp. 111–118

Category 5: Surgical and anatomical treatises

Jukka Tyrkkö | pp. 119–126

Category 6: Philosophical Transactions

Turo Hiltunen | pp. 127–132

Appendix: Medicine in society

Irma Taavitsainen and Carla Suhr | pp. 133–146

Part III. Studies

Gaining new knowledge through Early Modern English Medical Texts

Päivi Pahta | pp. 149–150

Explorations through Early Modern English Medical Texts: Charting changes in medical discourse and scientific thinking

Anu Lehto, Raisa Oinonen and Päivi Pahta | pp. 151–166

Sign terms in specific medical genres in early modern medical texts

Jukka Tyrkkö | pp. 167–190

Intensifiers in competition: The picture from early English medical writing

Belén Méndez-Naya and Päivi Pahta | pp. 191–214

Part IV. Technical aspects

The corpus tool and special features of Early Modern Medical Texts

Jukka Tyrkkö | pp. 217–218

Exploring Early Modern English Medical Texts: Manual for EMEMT Presenter

Jukka Tyrkkö, Raymond Hickey and Ville Marttila | pp. 219–278

Improving the precision of corpus methods: The standardized version of Early Modern English Medical Texts

Anu Lehto, Alistair Baron, Maura Ratia and Paul Rayson | pp. 279–290

Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus bibliography | pp. 291–344

References | pp. 345–362

Name index | pp. 363–366

Subject index | pp. 367–370

“A most welcome addition to the world of diachronic English corpora. [...] I do not know any diachronic corpus of this dimension which is accompanied by such a wealth of instructive information. This is actually where corpus users should start before they embark on more sophisticated automatic analyses of ever-growing amounts of data and this is where they should return to when they seek explanations for their corpus findings.”

Thomas Kohnen, Universität zu Köln, in Journal of Historical Pragmatics, Vol. 14:2 (2013)

Cited by (31)

Cited by 31 other publications

Order by:

Hiltunen, Turo & Irma Taavitsainen

2022. Chapter 1. Corpora, pragmatics, and historical medical discourse. In Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 330], ► pp. 1 ff.

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.

Moskowich, Isabel

2022. Irma Taavitsainen and Turo Hiltunen (eds.). Late Modern English Medical Texts: Writing medicine in the eighteenth century. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019. Pp. xix + 432. ISBN 9789027203229.. English Language and Linguistics 26:4 ► pp. 922 ff.

Ollikainen, Karoliina

2022. Chapter 11. Communicating authority. In Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 330], ► pp. 251 ff.

Schneider, Gerold

2022. Chapter 3. Medical topics and style from 1500 to 2018. In Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 330], ► pp. 49 ff.

Schnelle, Gohar, Carolin Odebrecht, Anke Lüdeling, Laura Perlitz & Catharina Fisher

2022. Chapter 7. “Die Blumenzeit der Frau”. In Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 330], ► pp. 153 ff.

Walker, Terry & Merja Kytö

2022. Chapter 5. Survival or death. In Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 330], ► pp. 105 ff.

Condorelli, Marco

2021. The Standardisation ofiandyin Early Modern English (1500–1700). English Studies 102:1 ► pp. 101 ff.

Menzel, Katrin, Jörg Knappen & Elke Teich

2021. Generating linguistically relevant metadata for the Royal Society Corpus. Research in Corpus Linguistics 9:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Goulart, Larissa, Bethany Gray, Shelley Staples, Amanda Black, Aisha Shelton, Douglas Biber, Jesse Egbert & Stacey Wizner

2020. Linguistic Perspectives on Register. Annual Review of Linguistics 6:1 ► pp. 435 ff.

Jiang, Feng (Kevin)

2019. Isabel Moskowich, Gonzalo Camiña Rioboo, Inés Lareo & Begoña Crespo (eds.), ‘The conditioned and the unconditioned’: Late Modern English texts on philosophy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016. Pp. xi + 182 (incl. CD-Rom). ISBN 9789027212290.. English Language and Linguistics 23:1 ► pp. 221 ff.

Rodríguez-Puente, Paula

2019. The English Phrasal Verb, 1650–Present,

Sylwanowicz, Marta

2018. Middle and Early Modern English Medical Recipes: Some Notes on Specialised Terminology. Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies :27/2 ► pp. 89 ff.

Tyrkkö, Jukka & Joanna Kopaczyk

2018. Chapter 1. Present applications and future directions in pattern-driven approaches to corpus linguistics. In Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 82], ► pp. 1 ff.

Whitt, Richard J.

2018. Using diachronic corpora to understand the connection between genre and language change. In Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 85], ► pp. 1 ff.

Whitt, Richard J.

2022. Chapter 8. Language, labour and ideology. In Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 330], ► pp. 179 ff.

WHITT, RICHARD J.

2023. Epistemic space and key concepts in early and late modern medical discourse: an exploration of two genres. English Language and Linguistics 27:2 ► pp. 241 ff.

Fanego, Teresa, Paula Rodríguez-Puente, María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo, Cristina Blanco-García & Iván Tamaredo

2017. The Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535–1999 (CHELAR): A resource for analysing the development of English legal discourse. ICAME Journal 41:1 ► pp. 53 ff.

Martín, Javier Calle

2017. “When That Wounds Are Evil Healed”: Revisiting Pleonastic That in Early English Medical Writing. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 52:1 ► pp. 5 ff.

Monaco, Leida Maria

2016. Was late Modern English scientific writing impersonal?. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21:4 ► pp. 499 ff.

Monaco, Leida Maria

2021. Chapter 15. Spotting register-internal variation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life sciences. In “All families and genera”, ► pp. 290 ff.

Romero-Barranco, Jesús

2016. Adverbials and inversion in early English scientific writing. Brno studies in English :1 ► pp. [113] ff.

Taavitsainen, Irma

2015. Medical news in England 1665–1800 in journals for professional and lay audiences. In Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 5], ► pp. 135 ff.

Taavitsainen, Irma

2018. Scholastic genre scripts in English medical writing 1375–1800. In Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 85], ► pp. 95 ff.

Taavitsainen, Irma

2020. A medical debate of “heated pamphleteering” in the early eighteenth century. In Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 312], ► pp. 142 ff.

Taavitsainen, Irma

2021. Medical book reviews 1665–1800. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 22:2 ► pp. 245 ff.

Calle-Martín, Javier & Jesús Romero-Barranco

2014. On the Use ofthat/zeroas Object Clause Links in Early English Medical Writing. Studia Neophilologica 86:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Esteban‐Segura, Laura

2012. Medical, Official, and Monastic Documents in Sociolinguistic Research. In The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, ► pp. 140 ff.

Kytö, Merja & Päivi Pahta

2012. Evidence from historical corpora up to the twentieth century. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, ► pp. 123 ff.

[no author supplied]

2011. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. English Language and Linguistics 15:3 ► pp. 579 ff.

[no author supplied]

2022. Sociolinguistic Variation in Old English [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 13],

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 september 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.

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