Representing and Redefining Specialised Knowledge: Medical Discourse

Abstract

This volume brings together five selected papers on medical discourse which show how specialised medical corpora provide a framework that helps those engaging with medical discourse to determine how the everyday and the specialised combine to shape the discourse of medical professionals and non-medical communities in relation to both long and short-term factors. The papers contribute, in an exemplary way, to illustrating the shifting boundaries in today’s society between the two major poles making up the medical discourse cline: healthcare discourse at the one end, which records the demand for personalised therapies and individual medical services; and clinical discourse the other, which documents research into society’s collective medical needs