Meloncon, Lisa K. (Author)
University of South Carolina
Holcomb, Christopher
Edition Details: Advisor: Holcomb, Christopher
Physical Details: 256 pp.
Language: English
Obsessed with plague, pox, worms, and a host of other health problems, citizens of the early modern era constantly tried to keep their bodies in balance: the inside with the outside, the "night-side" with the day-side, the kingdom of well with the kingdom of sick. In their attempts to balance their dual identities, they armed themselves with popular medical texts. I argue that these texts constructed medicine, knowledge, and genre during the early sixteenth-century, ca. 1500-1540, and they illustrate the complex ways early modern, technical writers used classical rhetorical practices in popular science literature. My study demonstrates that early modern technical writers incorporated a varied stylistic approach that moved along a style continuum and cannot be classified simply as the plain style. Visually, popular medical texts were the first to control meaning through format and design, and my conclusions will help bring a greater balance to the history of visual rhetoric. Moreover, I trace and characterize the conventions of the instructional genre and its beginnings in print history. My findings suggest a close relationship between the materiality of the text, generic form, and the importance of rhetoric in popular science. While other studies have examined rhetoric in the early modern era, none have attempted reconstruct the vast information known as science and medicine in the early modern period. Creating a new model of science that differs from existing scholarship, I am able to expose the organization and practice of rhetoric as a key component of medicine's success. Particularly, I show the importance of rhetoric, not merely as persuasion, but as the connection between language and knowledge and as the connection between medicine and society, showing how early modern popular medical texts serves as a rhetoric of science .
...MoreDescription On early modern popular medical texts and the rhetoric of science. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 67/03 (2006). UMI pub. no. 3210053.
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