Diet, nutrition, regimen: food and healthcare in 18th-century British midwifery

The general aim of this contribution is to offer a historical and diachronic linguistic analysis of a corpus of works on 18th-c. British midwifery in order to examine and highlight the role of food and healthcare for women and children as it emerges from medical writing. The investigation is essentially focussed on (i) the terminology related to diet, nutrition, and regimen, and (ii) the lexical network that emerges around these lexemes, especially in relation to the discourse of ‘food and/in healthcare’ or, in a more general perspective, to the notion of maternal and child wellbeing. The approach is qualitative, with a specific focus on selecting and analysing extracts of different length and complexity from the corpus. However, to retrieve the words diet, nutrition, regimen, collect data, and identify relevant co(n)texts of use (KWIC) and recurring sequences, a preliminary corpus-based quantitative approach is employed. The perspectives in which data, i.e., extracts and examples, are provided and discussed necessarily refer to the social history of medicine (e.g., the function and role of midwifery in the period considered). Results highlight a variety of discourses on and around diet, nutrition, regimen, along with a variety of multiword expressions (e.g., collocations, frequent patterns, clusters) which lexicalise the notions of healthcare and wellbeing as major issues, especially in late 18th-century medicalised midwifery practice.