Main description:

The eighteenth century in medicine is a fallow period lying between the innovations of the Royal Society (1662-) with its new ways of doing science and the nineteenth-century achievements of clinical and laboratory medicine. The period deserves more attention, as the seeds of some modern approaches, like statistics leading to probabilities, date from this century. This volume provides a comprehensive description of the main developments in 1700-1800. Its main focus is on language use in context, with stylistic variation according to genres, authors and audiences. The volume is interdisciplinary: the chapters chart changes and continuities and draw on corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, history of medicine, digital humanities and computer science, and all studies are based on the corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT). In addition, the volume contains a detailed description of corpus categories focusing on chronological coverage of the texts, criteria for inclusion, discourse forms, and background facts. The volume concludes with a Manual of the corpus, providing information about annotation conventions and examples of how the corpus can be used.
The book is accompanied by a CD-rom containing the corpus. The corpus consists of files in XML and TXT format, which can be used in various corpus research software programs.