Chapter 3

Topics of eighteenth-century medical writing with triangulation of methods

This chapter deals with the most important developments within society and the medical discourse community in the eighteenth-century Britain. It applies several methods by way of triangulation to probe into relevant aspects of the history of medicine and medical writing between 1700 and 1800. The first part provides a comprehensive overview, mostly based on the previous literature, giving pertinent background information to the corpus and its text selection. The second part contains the first large-scale mapping of medical writing in the late modern period as an interdisciplinary enterprise between computer science, medical history, and linguistics with a Digital Humanities application. The results of empirical bottom-up quantitative assessments with Topic Modeling and Kernel Density Estimation applications reveal what changes and what remains constant in this period. The programs also indicate which texts were important as forerunners of innovative ideas and which adhered to the old patterns of thought. The third part quotes pertinent text extracts for illustration and applies discourse analytical methods for a qualitative assessment. These passages show how the developments towards more modern approaches progressed and how linguistic practices reflect increasing professionalization in the field.