Chapter 5

Medical case reports in Late Modern English

This chapter shifts the focus to the patients, using discourse analysis. The medical case report is a narrative of a single case of disease or injury and it is one of the genres that have continuity throughout the history of English medical writing from the late medieval period to the present. However, its functions and linguistic realizations vary in different periods. Attention will be paid to the degree of conventionalization in the genre developments and the perspective through which the narrative is told. The method relies on both quantitative corpus linguistic and qualitative discursive analysis. The period and this century represent a transition from the earlier thought styles to more modern approaches to medicine. The first statistical assessments appear toward the end of the eighteenth century. The study traces how the developments in medical thinking are reflected in case narratives of different layers and fields of medical writing. The linguistic form of case studies varies considerably between different text categories, in particular specific treatises, surgical and anatomical texts, public health, and periodicals, and they are often embedded in longer texts within other genres. Instruction was the most common purpose of writing and continues in the eighteenth century, but new functions emerge as well, as the case reports demonstrate new methods of treatment and cures, and patients begin to record their own experiences as patients. This shift of angle is noteworthy, as for the first time we have “ego-documents” of the kind.