Digital patient narratives in the spotlight: a multilingual analysis of metaphors and medical terminology

Abstract

Health discourse analysis has become particularly attractive in recent years. It provides information about how the public understands certain more general concepts, such as health or disease, or more specific ones, such as obesity or cancer, and how these concepts are dealt with within health systems or in other areas, such as the media. The interest of this doctoral thesis lies in the discourse that emerges in other communicative spheres of society, where patients become producers of texts that constitute a genre that is still little explored and is configured in a specific format: digital patient narratives. Framed within medical humanities and narrative medicine, the main objective of this thesis is to study digital patient narratives from a multilingual and multicultural perspective, using Spanish, Italian and English as working languages and corpus analysis tools. Special attention will be paid to the use of elements such as metaphors and medical terminology.