This volume is the most recent contribution to a growing body of research on the history of medical writing in English, based primarily on papers delivered at the second International Conference on Historical Medical Discourse, held at the University of Helsinki in June 2019. Its complement volume, Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse (edited by Turo Hiltunen and Irma Taavitsainen, John Benjamins, 2022), features additional studies based on papers delivered at this conference. But whereas the latter's focus is on studies that use corpus linguistics to analyse (historical) pragmatic phenomena, the papers in Genre in English Medical Writing are of a more general philological nature, focusing on broader issues related to genre and text production rather than specific linguistic phenomena – although there is clear overlap between the two. The volume consists of fourteen studies plus a few additional chapters consisting of ancillary discussions. A gallery of images and paratexts is also provided.
Irma Taavitsainen, Jeremy J. Smith, Turo Hiltunen and Carla Suhr open the volume with their introductory chapter, ‘Medical discourse and sociocultural contexts, 1500–1820’ (pp. 1–12). Their stated aim of the volume is ‘to show how medical texts were modified to new uses and forms across several centuries, and how medical discourse was deployed in different cultural contexts’ (p. 1), with the notion of genre being central to this endeavour. They provide a helpful discussion distinguishing the concept of genre from the related notions of register and text type, as well as an overview of the research traditions informing the studies contained herein (traditional philology, historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics). The role of multimodality and ideology (what constitutes ‘normal’ science in a given period?) is also given some attention. Finally, the rationale of the volume's structure is explained.
The first four contributions focus on late medieval manuscripts and their legacies in the medical milieu of early modernity. Peter Murray Jones begins this section with a discussion of ‘John Arderne's afterlife in manuscript and print’ (pp. 13–31). Jones examines Arderne's manuscript Practica (1376), particularly the sections devoted to fistula-in-ano, and explores how this text enjoyed a lengthy afterlife in the early modern period, being copied numerous times and often used by surgeons in the seventeenth century. There is also some discussion of the later printed version of this text, although it appears that the manuscript copies remained more prominent throughout the period under investigation. The legacy of a single text is also part of Lori Jones’ contribution, ‘John Mirfield's Gouernayl of Helþe’ (pp. 32–51). Here, Jones details what changes were made to this text, written sometime in the fourteenth century, in later manuscript copies (particularly Wellcome MS 647) and Caxton's printed version. Jones provides an overview of the content of Mirfield's text in the context of the medieval genre of the health regime. She shows how Caxton's printed version differs regarding the advice surrounding wine and sexual activity, whereas the Wellcome manuscript betrays more moral overtones (due to the influence of the Reformation). There is also a discussion of how medical theory and advice evolved in concert with broader sociocultural happenings.
The focus shifts to surgical handbooks in the next chapter, Chiara Benati's ‘Surgical handbooks translated into Low German’ (pp. 52–67). Benati explores how two High German texts – Hieronymus Brunschwig's Buch der Cirurgia (1497) and Hans von Gersdorff's Feldtbuch der Wundarzney (1517) – found their way into Low German as Boek der Wundenartzstedye (1518) and Dat velt bock (c. 1538), respectively. The latter was translated in manuscript form, whereas the former appeared in print. The translation of Brunschwig aimed at a wide readership among practising surgeons and those in training, and it is fairly faithful to the original. The translation of Gersdorff's text (in manuscript form) features more selective sections, which the scribe discerned as most useful and interesting.
Alpo Honkapohja is interested in ‘Tracing the early modern John of Burgundy’ (pp. 68–88), whereby he notes that the medieval plague treatise (John of Burgundy's Treatise) was never printed, but at least eight early modern manuscript copies existed. He traces the changes made in the manuscript copies and provides an overview of early modern manuscript culture: the owners of manuscripts and why they owned such texts, and what their use value was even after printed texts became the norm. He explores the function of notes made on manuscripts and concludes with a discussion of changing discursive practices: the de-emphasising of astrology, a more overtly moral tone and changing sexual terminology.
The next four chapters concentrate on the terminology of medical science, and the first one is also concerned with the plague. But whereas Honkapohja's discussion focuses on texts written during early outbreaks of the plague, Alberto Tanturri focuses on one of the last outbreaks, ‘The plague in Southern Italy in 1815–1816’ (pp. 89–103). Tanturri surveys plague treatises written in response to the Noja plague and looks at authors’ differing classifications of medicines and therapeutic recommendations, as well as how these writings were actually applied in practice. Jeremy J. Smith follows this up with a brief chapter ‘On excitability’ (pp. 104–7). Smith discusses the conception of excitability (the life force of the body) in medical writing, with an eye towards John Brown's nosographic system Brunonianism and the Romantic writers. This concept's relevance to the texts covered in Tanturri's chapter is then discussed.
In ‘Systems and centos: Some eighteenth-century dictionaries’ (pp. 108–27), Roderick McConchie provides an overview of the presentation of medical terminology in dictionaries, with the distinction between dictionary and encyclopaedia not always clear. Attitudes towards lexicography and the presentation of medical lexis are discussed, and McConchie focuses on Ephraim Chambers (whose emphasis was on linguistic classification and semantic hierarchies), Robert James (who provided much terminology, but not always a lot of definitions) and James Keir, compiler of an ambitious chemical dictionary that hardly got off the ground due to Keir's lingering attachment to phlogistonianism – a debunked scientific theory that postulated the presence of fire-like elements (phlogistons) contained in combustible materials.
‘Medical vocabulary in English Romantic literature’ (pp. 128–49) is the focus of Jeremy J. Smith's more lengthy contribution. Smith provides a (re)examination of some Romantic authors’ use of medical terminology, keeping in mind Romantic – rather than present-day – conceptions of medicine. He makes use of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), various corpora and Romantic medical authors (namely William Cullen) to contextualise some key terms from Romantic literature. The subsequent discussion concerns Samuel Taylor Coleridge and panting, Mary Shelley and panting, passion, gentle, rage and burning, and finally, John Keats’ use of touch.
Isabel De la Cruz-Cabanillas concludes the section on terminology with ‘Foreign ingredients in Early and Late Modern English recipes’ (pp. 150–66), in which she explores mostly unexamined manuscript recipes to trace the influence of New World ingredients in English medical recipes. Ingredients such as tobacco, guaiac, sarsaparilla, sassafras and crab-tree are discussed in detail, and De la Cruz-Cabanillas also discovers that the appearance of some of these ingredients (such as crab-tree) in these recipes antedate the first OED attestations.
The next three contributions focus on processes of change that occur in particular genres. Irma Taavitsainen begins with a discussion of ‘Walter Bailey's (1529–1593) medical genres’ (pp. 167–86) and examines how the sixteenth-century doctor's writings reflected both the older scholastic and the newer empirical writing styles, in terms of genre, text type and specific linguistic features (types of conjunctions, modality). Taavitsainen illustrates this by concentrating on Bailey's treatment of mithridatium, eyesight, waters and peppers.
Maura Ratia continues the discussion of genre-specific change with her contribution ‘London Bills of Mortality of the seventeenth century’ (pp. 187–210). This is a genre related to plague outbreaks, and Ratia shows how each Bill of Mortality actually contains many genres beyond the presentation of statistics: descriptions, recipes, religious instruction, etc. Attention is also paid to the visual, multi-modal nature of the genre, and how things changed during the century.
Carla Suhr shifts the focus to ‘Advertising proprietary medicine in pamphlets’ (pp. 211–30). This is a study of late seventeenth-century medical advertisements, a novel genre combining the new advertising function while appropriating existing learned medical knowledge. Suhr conducts a move analysis of the genre (Swales Reference Swales2004), finding the following moves: Endorsement, Symptoms, Virtues, Directions for use, Testimonials, Addressing critics and competitors and Sales information. She finds that Virtues, Directions for use and Sales information are almost universal through the genre, whereas moves such as Symptoms, Testimonials and Addressing critics and competitors are less frequently employed.
Persuasion and medical recipes are the focus of the next two contributions, albeit approached from different angles. In ‘Persuasion in Hungarian medical recipes’ (pp. 231–53), Ágnes Kuna conducts a study of persuasive phrases in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hungarian medical recipes (which are included in various collections plus the Ars medica). She focuses on various conceptual categories of persuasion (General Positive Value, Intensity, etc.) and their quantitative distribution across recipe collections from a number of different angles. Martti Mäkinen, on the other hand, is interested in concepts of classical rhetoric (ethos, logos, pathos) and metadiscourse in his contribution, ‘Persuasion in Early Modern English medical recipes’ (pp. 254–77). Using the Early Modern English Medical Texts corpus as his dataset (EMEMT; Taavitsainen et al. Reference Taavitsainen, Pahta, Hiltunen, Marttila, Ratia, Suhr, Tyrkkö, Honkapohja, Lehto and Oinonen2010), he discusses a range of metadiscourse markers, and then conducts a quantitative analysis, revealing certain trends found in the recipes (like how an increase in the use of epistemic modality is accompanied by a decrease in the use of deontic modality, due to the rise of the empirical thought style and the decline of the scholastic style).
‘Richard III: Fact, myth, fiction’ by Anna Ilona Rajala and Timo Uotinen is the final contribution (pp. 278–96). It is highly interdisciplinary in its orientation, drawing from history (of medicine), disability studies and literary studies. Rajala and Uotinen provide a cross-genre examination of discussions of King Richard III in light of the Leicester car park excavation in 2012. They show how historiographic and medical assessments of Richard III are not necessarily free of myth, whereas overtly fictional (and mythological) portrayals – such as those found in Shakespeare – contain a degree of truth value as to the historicity of Richard III.
Peter Murray Jones provides two short contributions to finish up the volume. In ‘Images and paratexts’ (pp. 297–301), he provides a brief overview of the role played by images and paratexts in the various contributions to the volume. And then he proceeds to his ‘Preface to the Image Gallery’ (pp. 302–3), which follows hereafter (pp. 304–18).
Overall, this volume provides an excellent addition to the scholarship devoted to the history of medical writing. The topics and methodologies presented here are both incredibly diverse and, at the same time, remarkably unifying. For example, the plague serves as the catalyst for texts discussed by Honkapohja, Tanturri and Ratia, yet each author discusses different genres stemming from different time periods, and these genres are approached in different ways. Kuna and Mäkkinen are both interested in recipes and persuasion, but they each focus on different linguistic aspects of the phenomenon. Taken together, they constitute both broad and deep discussions of the topics at hand. And the inclusion of images throughout the volume fosters a deeper appreciation for the material aspect of medical writing during the early and late modern periods: those images that are central to the authors’ discussion are found within the chapter itself (as in Ratia's contribution, for example), whereas those that are complementary to the discussion are contained in the Image Gallery at the end. Where quantitative information is presented, it is always done so in a clear and understandable manner; all tables or charts are introduced and explained clearly. Kuna might have done well to use normalised frequencies in some places (particularly figure 14.3) and label exactly what the values on the y-axis of some of her other figures represented, but at least this did not detract from her overall conclusions or the efficacy of her argument.
And given that the contributions by Benati, Tanturri and Kuna did not even focus on English texts, I must admit I found the title of the volume a bit confusing. These are all excellent contributions that both complement and are complemented by the other chapters in which English texts are under examination. If anything, they strengthen the volume by placing these English medical texts – the bulk of the volume's focus – in a pan-European perspective. But perhaps a title more reflective of this diversity should have been used instead.
Regardless, the breadth of topics and methodologies presented in this volume is impressive, and taken together with Hiltunen & Taavitsainen (Reference Hiltunen and Taavitsainen2022), they provide a state-of-the-art piece of research into historical medical discourse.
