Late Modern English Medical Texts

Writing medicine in the eighteenth century

Including the LMEMT Corpus

Editors
ORCID logoIrma Taavitsainen | University of Helsinki
ORCID logoTuro Hiltunen | University of Helsinki
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027203229 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

The eighteenth century in medicine is a fallow period lying between the innovations of the Royal Society (1662–) with its new ways of doing science and the nineteenth-century achievements of clinical and laboratory medicine. The period deserves more attention, as the seeds of some modern approaches, like statistics leading to probabilities, date from this century. This volume provides a comprehensive description of the main developments in 1700–1800. Its main focus is on language use in context, with stylistic variation according to genres, authors and audiences. The volume is interdisciplinary: the chapters chart changes and continuities and draw on corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, history of medicine, digital humanities and computer science, and all studies are based on the corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT). In addition, the volume contains a detailed description of corpus categories focusing on chronological coverage of the texts, criteria for inclusion, discourse forms, and background facts. The volume concludes with a Manual of the corpus, providing information about annotation conventions and examples of how the corpus can be used.

The book is accompanied by a CD-rom containing the corpus. The corpus consists of files in XML and TXT format, which can be used in various corpus research software programs.

[Not in series, 221] 2019.  xix, 432 pp., incl. CD-RoM
Publishing status: Available
Table of Contents
“[T]he LMEMT corpus achieves what the compilers intended: it presents a excellent sampling of eighteenth-century medical writing and, alongside MEMT and EMEMT, provides continuity of corpus coverage from the medieval through the late modern English periods of medical writing in English. It is not only an indispensable resource for those interested in historical pragmatics and domain-specific language usage in the history of the English language, but also those interested in the history of medicine.”
Cited by

Cited by 13 other publications

Arnold, Whitney & Corey Arnold
2022. Medicine in theMonthly Review: Revealing public medical discourse with topic modelling. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37:3  pp. 611 ff. DOI logo
Bizzoni, Yuri, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Peter Fankhauser & Elke Teich
2020. Linguistic Variation and Change in 250 Years of English Scientific Writing: A Data-Driven Approach. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 3 DOI logo
Grego, Kim
2022. Chapter 12. How old is old?. In Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 330],  pp. 273 ff. DOI logo
Hiltunen, Turo
2021. Intensification in Eighteenth Century Medical Writing. Journal of English Linguistics 49:1  pp. 90 ff. DOI logo
Hiltunen, Turo
2022. Chapter 6. Towards a local grammar of stance expression in Late Modern English medical writing. In Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 330],  pp. 127 ff. DOI logo
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. DOI logo
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
Lonati, Elisabetta
2022. Ethics, moral practices and age-related social issues in late 18th-century medical discourse. Journal of Language and Discrimination 6:1 DOI logo
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. DOI logo
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. DOI logo
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. DOI logo
Taavitsainen, Irma
2021. Medical book reviews 1665–1800. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 22:2  pp. 245 ff. DOI logo
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. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 february 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.

Subjects

Main BIC Subject

CF/2AB: Linguistics/English

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009010: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2018059723 | Marc record