Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT)

LMEMT is the third and final part of the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing 1375–1800. Changes in extralinguistic circumstances of medical writing have been taken into consideration, and the category system has been adjusted to the eighteenth century. The compilation principles are compatible with two earlier corpora, EMEMT and MEMT.

We have updated our annotation paradigm to TEI-XML to allow more flexibility and the addition of new layers of annotation. It is possible to search for texts on the basis of topic, bibliographic features or background information.

Time of compilation: 2010–2018
Released: 2019 (by John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam)
Size: over 2 million words
Language: Late Modern English
Number of texts/samples: 628
Period: 1700–1800

Team

Compilers (from the University of Helsinki, except when mentioned): Irma Taavitsainen, Turo Hiltunen, Anu Lehto, Ville Marttila, Päivi Pahta (University of Tampere), Maura Ratia, Carla Suhr, Jukka Tyrkkö (Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden)

Basic information

LMEMT is compiled from printed data and covers a wide range of texts from learned treatises and journal articles to health guides and popular books on medicine. Periodicals had emerged as a new type of scientific and medical writing in the seventeenth century and grew into a major medium of communication in the eighteenth century.

The LMEMT Corpus contains texts from eight text categories, defined by external criteria. Short texts are included in all, while longer writings are represented by extracts.

1. General treatises and textbooks
2. Specific treatises with four subcategories: Diseases, Methods, Therapeutic substances, and Midwifery
3. Medical recipe collections
4. Regimens
5. Surgical and anatomical texts
6. Public health
7. Scientific periodicals: The Philosophical Transactions and the Edinburgh Medical Journal
8. General periodical: The Gentleman’s Magazine

Availability

The corpus is sold with an accompanying book Late Modern English Medical Texts: Writing medicine in the eighteenth century Including the LMEMT Corpus, edited by Irma Taavitsainen and Turo Hiltunen.

This interdisciplinary volume provides a comprehensive description of the main developments of medical writing in 1700–1800. It contains detailed descriptions of corpus categories focusing on chronological coverage of the texts, criteria for inclusion, discourse forms, and background facts. In addition, a Manual is included, providing information about annotation conventions and examples of how the corpus can be used.

Book DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/z.221