John Pechey (1654–1718) and the Popularization of Learned Medicine

This essay offers a corpus-based linguistic analysis of the paratexts of the works of John Pechey (1654–1718), a licentiate physician and prolificmedical author and popularizer, whose ideas and practice brought him into conflict with the Royal College of Physicians. Following the methodology of corpus-assisted discourse analysis, historical discourse analysis, and historical sociopragmatics, the essay analyses the paratextual material of Pechey’s medical publications, with the aims of (a) collecting a corpus of texts published under his name, (b) assessing his role in the popularization of learned medicine, and (c) tracing how he constructed and performed his identity both as a knowledgeable medical practitioner and as a critic of the beliefs and practices of the Royal College of Physicians.