Chapter 9

Professional and lay medical texts in the eighteenth century

This study focuses on stylistic features in medical texts for different audiences in various channels of publication. My aim is to explore whether there are differences between medical writings for professional and lay audiences. Authors mostly belonged to educated professionals who wrote for their peers, but there are also writings for general audiences. The most important channel for communicating new medical knowledge was through monographs, but the first specialized medical journals were founded in the 1730s. The first magazine for polite society readership was established in the same decade. Texts dealing with fashionable topics like inoculation, longevity, sea bathing, air and water are compared to one another. The main method is qualitative discourse analysis aided by corpus linguistic methods. Writings for professional audiences rely on knowledge-based arguments, while texts for lay readers contain more emotive language use, where a polite society style of writing is present, too. The dichotomy between professional and lay proves problematic and in the light of the present data the assumption of a clear borderline between professional and lay does not hold.