Creating a forum for publishing case studies within AWP Trust: A quality improvement project

3^rd Euro-Global Experts Meeting on Medical Case Reports

June 30-July 02, 2016 Valencia, Spain

Magda Zelazowska and Magdalena Zabielska

University of Warsaw, Poland
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Clin Case Rep

Abstract :

In this poster, the issue of patient presentation in professional medical texts has been addressed from a linguistic perspective. To this aim a corpus of medical case reports has been compiled in order to examine both direct and indirect references to the patients described there. The studied tokens are investigated from two perspectives. First, the focus falls on patient textual presence/absence as conditioned by the type of information appearing in respective text-parts. Second, the analysis of patient reference in the sections of the case reports is discussed with respect to some of the facts from the history of the development of medicine, as, according to Bazerman (1988), scientific discourses are shaped by given disciplines (1988: 47). In the case of the texts in question, their form and content may also be influenced by the currently practiced model of medicine, i.e., the biomedical model. Furthermore, the analysis draws on the hierarchical levels of medical description as well as on the two models of disease presentation. The study reveals that as the texts progress, they become more patient-evacuated and focuses on his/her progressively smaller body-parts. In other words, patient reference changes from direct indexicality to indirect references to his/her body parts or the textual absence of the treated. This effect is achieved not only by the type of information imparted but also by the lexical and grammatical resources used to describe it. Consequently, the mode of writing as testified in the case reports at hand contributes to the presentation of mental/bodily experience, disease and treatment in abstraction from a patient.

Biography :

Magda Zelazowska is currently a PhD Student in Applied Linguistic at University of Warsaw, Poland. Her scientific interests include medical language and medical translation, translation studies, doctor-patient communication and scientific writing. She is an active member of national and international conferences, author and co-author of papers devoted to the medical language, English for Medical Purposes and case reports’ discourse.

Email: magda.zelazowska@student.uw.edu.pl