Establishment and development of the medical genre "medicinal tale" in the documents of the pharmaceutical order of 17th century

Olekhnovich Olga Georgievna, Antsiferova Olga Nikolaevna

The article presents the results of the linguistic analysis of the medical genre "medicinal tale" based on the material of the "Documents of the Pharmaceutical Order" of the 17th century. More than 50 "medicinal tales" of various subjects – medical certificates, healers’ opinions on request, referrals for treatment, less often case histories were used for the study. The tales we are analyzing do not have any attribute in the title; their title is determined by the addresser (healer) or addressers (healers), whose testimony formulates the content of the document. As a rule, trained foreign specialists were the authors of the "tales". The common genre features of the "medicinal tales" (a set of document details arranged in a set sequence) as well as their distinctive features (volume, content, and structural organization) were identified. The formation of the document "medicinal tale" was significantly influenced by medical texts in Latin, the so-called "doctor's tales", which created a certain "language stereotype". This is due not only to the harmonization of inter-language means, which are of Greek and Latin origin, but also to the organization of the text. Due to the weak terminology in the documents, internal language tools were mainly selected. A distinctive feature of fairy tales is the lack of nominativity, the use of predicative descriptions instead of terminological designations.

Keywords:medicinal tale, documents of the Pharmaceutical order, medical genre, healer.