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.
References
Corpora and tools
Burney collection of Newspapers
ECCO = Eighteenth Century Collections Online
EEBO = Early English Books Online
EMEMT = Early Modern English Medical Texts
2010 Compiled by
Irma Taavitsainen,
Päivi Pahta,
Turo Hiltunen,
Ville Marttila,
Martti Mäkinen,
Maura Ratia,
Carla Suhr &
Jukka Tyrkkö, with software by Raymond Hickey. CD-ROM with an accompanying book. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
LMEMT = Late Modern English Medical Texts 1700–1800
Forthcoming. Compiled by
Irma Taavitsainen,
Turo Hiltunen,
Anu Lehto,
Ville Marttila,
Martti Mäkinen,
Raisa Oinonen,
Päivi Pahta,
Maura Ratia,
Carla Suhr &
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