Historical Medical Discourse

This collection showcases original research highlighting innovations in the application of corpus linguistic methods to the study of English historical medical discourse.

The volume builds on recent work expanding the contours of health communication research to extend to medical texts of the past, whose preservation allows for a clearer understanding of changes to medical knowledge and practices over time through their production, reception, and use. Chapters explore how corpus linguistic methods allow for a critical examination of how this past medical knowledge is mediated through language across a diverse range of health issues, time periods, textual genres, and sociocultural contexts. While focusing on the English language, the collection demonstrates a point of entry for future work applying corpus linguistic methodologies to historical medical texts more broadly across other languages, periods, and texts to continue growing this burgeoning area of research.

This book will be of interest to scholars in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, medical humanities, and historical linguistics.