Medical Writing in Early Modern English (review)

This anthology, the product primarily of philologists in Finland, attempts to chart early modern English medical writing from a linguistic point of view. Given the dramatic shifts in medical theory and thought from 1500 to 1700, the authors collectively aim to pinpoint the ways in which the printed word became the principal vehicle for communicating science in English. They use a new database, Early Modern English Medical Texts (hereafter the EMTEMT), over two million words of running text, and plumb it thoroughly for nuances in usage and emphasis. Containing about two-thirds of all the sixteenth-century medical titles printed in English (but few after 1650 due to sheer numbers), the EMEMT, made available to the public in December 2010, highlights the first half of the seventeenth century. Text categories include both professional and lay publications, general as well as specialized volumes, recipe collections, and the Philosophical Transactions (hereafter PT) of the Royal Society.

Twelve essays constitute this compilation, ranging from one by Turo Hiltunen and Jukka Tyrkko on verbs of knowing used by early modern writers to another on code-switching by Päivi Pahta. In the former piece, the authors can differentiate the use of knowing-verbs among different categories in the corpus and among intended reading audiences. Pahta focuses on the continued use of Latin and Greek as alternate phrases used in the corpus, even when works in the vernacular targeted lay readers; this code-switching added credibility and prestige even to the most pedestrian of publications. Two essays examine the Royal Society’s PT from its initial publication in March 1665. First, Maurizio Gotti from the University of Bergamo looks at the development of specialized discourse in the journal, noting that foreign contributions played an important part in its first volumes and help explain the publication’s continental popularity. Moreover, Gotti argues that the PT helped create new genres in English scientific writing while reporting news and accounts of experiments, incorporating letters and book reviews. Second, an international trio of linguists scrutinizes expressions of stance in early volumes of the PT (1665–1712) in order to better understand the audience and purpose of its medical emphasis. Bethany Gray, Douglas Biber, and Turo Hiltunen discover that, compared with other traditional medical writing in EMEMT, “texts in the PT were much more dialogic, often representing a kind of extended interaction among researchers” (224).

For the historian not also a linguist, the most readable chapters came at the beginning of the collection. Eight writers including the two editors of this anthology played a part in the creation of an overview of early modern medical texts in English, surveying the circulation of both manuscript and published works and the impact of print on medicine. Their introduction of EMEMT to the reader gives further details about the different categories contained within, such as general and specific treatises, regimens and health guides, surgical and anatomical treatises, and recipe collections. Cambridge historian Peter Murray Jones, well-known for his work on medieval medical iconography, has composed another chapter less burdened by discipline-specific jargon. He discusses the problems of assessing literacy in early modern England, particularly as it relates to the reading of medical texts, and reminds us that there were multiple ways in which the illiterate might access such information. Despite controversies over theory and jurisdiction among medical practitioners, they shared “a great deal of common ground about diagnosis and practice” (43).

Figures and tables appear in the midst of many of the chapters, charting topoi and sub-topoi, modal auxiliaries, and that-complement clause types (verb-controlled, adjective-controlled, and noun-controlled). Narratives are interrupted by the outline form of some of the pieces and the vocabularies used are often ponderous and unexplained to the non-linguist. In addition to the essays, Medical Writing in Early Modern English contains four appendices of raw data, stance markers, and a list of texts in the corpus...