Abstract
The discourse analysis of medical communication as a special case of institutional communication has made enormous progress in the past decades but has largely concentrated on the empirical analysis of corpora of current doctor- patient discourse, while other areas of medical communication as well as their historical dimension came out of focus. Therefore, the following contribution attempts to firstly provide the reader with a conceptual and terminological framework, in order to emphasize the relevance of rhetorical knowledge for a successful understanding between (medical) experts and lay people (patients). Secondly, addressing the less specialized reader, it gives an outline of the traditional rhetorical lines of medical communication from antiquity to the present. Against this background, the pragmatic conditions of this specific type of speech constellation can be described more precisely. On such a conceptual basis and within such a rhetorical and pragmatic framework, founded both historically and systematically, the entirety of discursive phenomena of institutional communication in health care institutions can be examined more closely. At the same time, this provides a more differentiated approach (compared to traditional literary approaches) to the interpretation of forms of ›aesthetic problematization‹ of medical communication in selected examples of fictional literature.
How Thumbelina Knows
