Medicine in the Monthly Review: Revealing public medical discourse with topic modelling

Author:

Arnold Whitney1,Arnold Corey2

Affiliation:

1. Department of Comparative Literature and Department of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, USA

2. Department of Radiological Sciences and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California Los Angeles, USA

Abstract

Abstract Historians of science and medicine have long argued for the need to recover non-specialist views of medicine and health, as research has often concentrated on practitioner accounts. In this paper, we examine medical discourse in the British periodical the Monthly Review. Published monthly from 1749 to 1844, the Monthly was greatly influential in its time. However, it has received limited scholarly attention, due in part to the unwieldy size of its corpus, which spans 96 years and 246 volumes, each composed of three–six monthly issues. We employ statistical topic modelling to analyse the Monthly, revealing the presentation and prevalence of various public medical discourses, as well as how these discourses varied over the course of the periodical’s almost 100 years. As the Monthly aimed to review every published text, it provides records of and contemporary discussions about thousands of texts currently lost from archives. This analysis of the Monthly ultimately sheds light on the medical topics and texts that featured prominently in British public discourse during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Publisher

Oxford University Press (OUP)

Subject

Computer Science Applications,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics,Information Systems

Reference71 articles.

1. The evolution of medical research writing from 1735 to 1985: the case of the Edinburgh Medical Journal;Atkinson;Applied Linguistics,1992

2. A genealogy of the increasing gap between science and the public;Bensaude-Vincent;Public Understanding of Science,2001

3. Latent Dirichlet allocation;Blei;Journal of Machine Learning Research,2003

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