Genre in English Medical Writing, 1500-1820: Sociocultural Contexts of Production and Use

Description

Written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this book offers novel perspectives on the history of medical writing and scientific thought-styles by examining patterns of change and reception in genres, discourse, and lexis in the period 1500-1820. Each chapter demonstrates in detail how changing textual forms were closely tied to major multi-faceted social developments: industrialisation, urbanisation, expanding trade, colonialization, and changes in communication, all of which posed new demands on medical care. It then shows how these developments were reflected in a range of medical discourses, such as bills of mortality, medical advertisements, medical recipes, and medical rhetoric, and provides an extensive body of case studies to highlight how varieties of medical discourse have been targeted at different audiences over time. It draws on a wide range of methodological frameworks and is accompanied by numerous relevant illustrations, making it essential reading for academic researchers and students across the human sciences.

Irma Taavitsainen is Professor Emerita of English Philology at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics, genre and register variation and the evolution of scientific thought styles in medical writing. Jeremy Smith is Professor Emeritus of English philology at Glasgow University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His interests include English historical linguistics, the history of Scots, and book history. Recent publications include Transforming Early English (2020). Carla Suhr is University Lecturer in English Philology at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on early modern English medical writing and early news discourse. She is a co-compiler of the early and late modern components of the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing (2010, 2019). Turo Hiltunen is University Lecturer in English at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has authored several studies on corpus pragmatics, corpus compilation, phraseology, and the language of science and medicine.