Medical Writing in Early Modern English. Ed. Irma Taavitsainen and Paivi Pahta

Historical and literary studies have come closer together and at times intermingled. The literary turn in history has challenged some of the orthodoxies that have been held in common by historians, though it is questionable whether historians have challenged in their turn the working practices of literary scholars. However, the relationship between students of language and historians has been, on the whole, less contentious.
Medical Writing in Early Modern English is a case in point. Very detailed and often highly technical grammatical and semantic analysis of the language structures used by practitioners and laypeople in different genres of medical writing sometimes confirms, sometimes modifies and nearly always enriches the existing understanding of the history of medicine and science of early modern England. The editors have gathered together an expert group of contributors many of whom are at the University of Helsinki, which has supported for some time research into medieval and early modern medical English. Most of the contributions are based upon the very large electronic searchable database, the corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT). It contains more than two million words from a very large number of representative texts, the extracts selected being typically around 10,000 words in length. The EMEMT is a resource whose potential for illuminating the linguistic and historical characteristics of early modern medicine is made clear in this book.