Part of
Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News DiscourseEdited by Birte Bös and Lucia Kornexl
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 5] 2015
► pp. 135–160
Edited by Birte Bös and Lucia Kornexl
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 5] 2015
► pp. 135–160
Medical news in England 1665–1800 in journals for professional and lay audiences
This article is based on three early periodicals: The Philosophical Transactions
for the Royal Society (PT, 1665–), The Edinburgh Medical Journal (EMJ, 1733–),
and The Gentleman’s Magazine (GM, 1731–). A broad and inclusive selection
of unexplored texts comes from a period in which conventions of scientific
and medical news discourse were being created and developed. In order to
detect the lines of development in more detail, I performed a series of Keyword
analyses (WordSmith) and complemented the study with qualitative assessment.
A comparison of PT vs. other contemporary medical texts of the corpus
of Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT) revealed features of the new
science, e.g. observation has a high keyness score. The developments towards
stricter professionalization and more public knowledge continue in professional
journals. Keywords of the 18th century (GM vs. PT and GM vs. EMJ) reveal
differences in lay practices as compared to professional writing. GM readership
shared advice for distributing knowledge of new treatments and cures, and the
‘public good’ becomes prominent.
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Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Menzel, Katrin
2022. Medical discourse in Late Modern English. In Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 330], ► pp. 79 ff. 
Lonati, Elisabetta
2020. Paratextual features in 18th-century medical writing. In The Dynamics of Text and Framing Phenomena [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 317], ► pp. 233 ff.
Bös, Birte
2017. Of hopes and plans. In Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 6], ► pp. 15 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 january 2025. 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.