The Vernacularization of Learned Medicine in Late-Seventeenth-Century England. Accommodating Translation Procedures and Popularizing Strategies

The late seventeenth century was a fundamental moment for the popularization and democratization of learned medicine in England. Growing levels of literacy among the upper-middle classes, coupled with the diffusion of the ideal of serving the common good, resulted in an unprecedented flourishing of the vernacular specialized publishing market. Medicine, which until that time had been confined to Latin texts and elite readers, was thus rendered accessible to a wider audience, which included not only less prestigious medical practitioners, but also lay readers. The present work, following historical discourse analytic and pragmatic methods, provides an overview of how learned medicine was actually accommodated to this new audience in late-seventeenth-century England. To do so, it collects a corpus of medical vernacularizations published between 1649 and 1699 and analyzes it in order to delineate the context of production and identify the translation procedures and popularizing strategies that were exploited to accommodate the specialized language and knowledge of medicine to a lay readership. The study revealed that, although literalism still largely dominated early modern translating practice, translators also endeavored to accommodate the specialized notions of medicine to the new target audience by implementing a number of sometimes slight but meaningful changes that rendered the source texts more accessible for an audience which was literate, but not university-educated.