Medical Discourse in Late Modern English : metalinguistic awareness and linguistic identity

This study focuses on 18th-century medical writing, particularly on those works issued in the second half of the century and explicitly discussing the need for clear rules in medical communication. Hints of metalinguistic awareness are not new of this period: at the start of the century, for example, Philip Woodman’s Medicus Novissimus; or, The Modern Physician (1712, 1722 2nd) declared to adopt “a Familiar Style […] adapted to the Meanest Capacities of Physical Practitioners” (title page). Even though the use of a ‘familiar style’ may sound as an advertisement addressed to the many different kinds of practitioners, at any level, performing medicine at the time, the title also highlights a new perspective in the development of disciplinary communication and disciplinary writing. Metalinguistic awareness, read as the possibility to choose responsibly how to convey medical contents in English and make them intelligible to an expert, semi-expert or non-expert audience, becomes a key factor in the second half of the century. This also implies that the emerging disciplinary community of professionals may be defined and even identified by shared linguistic features. The objective of this paper is the analysis of a set of texts to verify whether and how (recurrent) linguistic features become – and may be possibly considered – disciplinary bound.