This book is part of a larger interdisciplinary research endeavour in the medical humanities: 'Life (Beyond) Writing': Illness Narratives, which was funded by the Swiss National Science foundation (2009–2013). The focus here was on the linguistics sub-project in which the participants worked on a corpus of 278 reflective writing texts by medical students and doctors who wrote about an encounter with a patient who left an impression on them. In what follows, we will revisit the aims of the linguistics study and discuss potential transfer to the medical field.

8.1 Linguistic Insights Gained and Outlook

The corpus of reflective writing texts proved to be a rich resource for a linguistics study. In addition to establishing what the texts were about from a content point of view (Chapter 3), and what communication skills the writers discussed (Chapter 4), we approached three research fields in greater detail: genre analysis, interpersonal pragmatics and, related to the latter, identity construction.

Chapter 3 involved a content analysis of all the texts in the corpus, which resulted in a set of 27 themes that could be combined with each other. Among the top themes of the texts were 'communication strategies', 'student/expert emotions', 'patient emotions', 'special conditions', 'impact of illness on patient's life' and 'setting'. The 27 themes were thematically grouped into four focus areas (clusters): (1) focus on the context of the encounter; (2) focus on the patient; (3) focus on the student or expert physician; and (4) focus on the insights gained. With respect to methodology, establishing themes was challenging since the students touched on many different issues within the same text. This richness, however, was also one of the findings that shaped the rest of the study. Far from being a simple descriptive background chapter, the insights gained on the chosen topics helped us understand the corpus and develop and refine the research focus of the ensuing chapters, which all built on the content analysis.