Chapter 1

Towards new knowledge

Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT) is a new corpus representing printed medical writing in the eighteenth century. This chapter describes the structure and the main compilation principles of the corpus. Representativeness is a complex notion in corpus linguistics in general, and the issue is particularly challenging in the context of eighteenth-century medicine, where the volume of published texts increased considerably and the scope of the discipline widened. To provide a realistic picture of the variety of medical texts in this century, the field is divided into text categories, which reflect contemporary divisions and incorporate texts written for different purposes and addressed to different audiences. The corpus is designed for studies in areas such as linguistics, pragmatics, medical history, and Digital Humanities, which are showcased in the contributions to this book.