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Part of
Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse
Edited by Turo Hiltunen and Irma Taavitsainen
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 330] 2022
► pp. 229–250

Chapter 10
The discursive dynamics of personal experience narratives and medical advice in 18th-century British consultation letters

The case of Dr. William Cullen

 | University of Calabria
Medical consulting by letter was a common practice in eighteenth-century Britain since physical examination was still far from being an established diagnostic tool. Despite what this epistolary practice testifies of the importance of illness narratives in historical medical discourse, scant attention has been devoted to their discursive representations. This chapter examines the discursive dynamics of medical consulting letters, drawing on the Labovian framework and the RIAS (Roter Interaction Analysis System) method for coding medical interaction. Discourse analysis is performed on a dataset of sample letters from Dr. Cullen’s (1710–1790) collection to unpack the referential and evaluative functions of narratives by patients, and Cullen’s discourse strategies for building doctor-patient relationship. Results from the case study highlight the historical significance of mediating and interpreting illness narratives according to the Enlightenment symptom-based model.
Keywords: illness narratives, discursive dynamics, personal experience narratives (PENs), consultation letters, referential and evaluative functions, 18th-century medical epistolary discourse, William Cullen
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Orientation and evaluation in personal experience narratives
  • 3.The case of Dr. William Cullen’s epistolary collection
    • 3.1Aims and method
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.3Procedure
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1The referential functions of the PENs
    • 4.2The evaluative functions of the PENs
  • 5.Cullen’s medical responses: Discourse strategies
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.330.10pla
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