Chapter 8 is concerned with the use of historical corpora in the study of language relating to health. We present two case studies – one where an issue is well understood and discussed publicly, the other where there was a clear issue with the framing of a discussion. For the former study we explore the VicVaDis corpus, first introduced in chapter 1. We combine different corpus techniques to show the main anti-vaccination arguments in the corpus and to point out parallels with present-day anti-vaccination discourse. The second case study looks at the emergence of venereal disease in the seventeenth century using the Early English Books Online corpus. By examining collocates of the word pox, we are able to weed out relevant uses of the word (e.g., those which referred to venereal disease) as opposed to those which do not. Additionally, we show that through the investigation of one type of collocate (words referring to geographical locations) the analysis was taken in an unexpected but rewarding direction.

Every reputable new English dictionary, or new edition, published since 1987 has made use of a large collection of text, or ‘corpus’, for evidence of a word’s usage. In this chapter, one of the most eminent names in lexicography, Patrick Hanks, takes the reader on a journey to discover more about different kinds of dictionaries and corpora, and basic principles of corpus linguistics and lexicography. He outlines how dictionaries have made use of corpus evidence in the past, and proposes how they might make better use of them in the future.