Genres of English Scientific Narrative from 1375 to 1800: Professional and Lay Medical Discourses

ABSTRACT: Narrative elements with expressions of affect are found in scientific writing throughout its history. The aim of this assessment is to demonstrate in a socio-historical frame how the scope of narratives changes in the course of time, how narrative elements are used, and how they reflect the prevailing scientific thought styles in a diachronic perspective. I shall relate various narratives to the overall sociohistorical frame, taking the different genres into account. The material divides into professional, semi-professional, and lay texts. Medieval Latin case reports belonged to core science, but in the vernacular the genre acquired other functions. Surgical texts belonged to the spearhead of scholasticism, displaying its typical linguistic features. The Royal Society epitomized the core of the New Science and introduced the novel method of empiricism with narratives at center stage. Late modern medicine renewed the use of case studies by assessing them in series as the first step towards probabilities. In addition, different story types for heterogeneous audiences flourish, e.g. in the developing press culture.