Physician versus surgeon: Exploring the evaluative language in three texts concerning the Surgeons’ Bill of 1690

Abstract

This thesis examines the evaluative language used by early modern physicians in England to evaluate surgeons versus themselves. The purpose of this study was to discover the physicians’ linguistic expressions of their attitudes in the same year that the Surgeons’ Bill of 1690 was read by the Parliament. The materials used for the study were three anonymous texts written by the London College of Physicians in the year 1690 for the purpose of arguing against the Surgeons’ Bill, a bill that was brought to the Parliament by the surgeons, to procure the rights to administer internal medicines. The data was categorised according to the categorisations of Appraisal Framework (AF) developed by J. R. Martin and P. R. R. White (2005). I identified evaluative language from the subcategories of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation according to AF. In the categorisation of data, close reading was applied to identify both explicit and implicit evaluative language in the utterances. Due to the subjective nature of the AF, this study was focused on qualitative analysis and quantities were analysed only briefly in the categories of Attitude and Graduation. The physicians evaluated surgeons and themselves in the same categories of Appraisal, and the results show that the evaluation of ethics was the most frequent. As expected, the attitudes towards surgeons were overwhelmingly negative and those towards physicians positive. The study shows that physicians appraised the surgeons mostly as a group of unorganised practitioners and themselves based on the prestige of the London College of Physicians. It was determined in this study that the physicians used evaluative strategies typical for the early modern period to build solidarity and express their attitudes, but due to the narrow scope of this study the topic should be investigated further in future studies.