ABSTRACT
Written forms of health communication provide opportunities for exploring not only contemporary but also historical representations of health and illness. In this chapter, we reflect on how various aspects of health experiences have been documented in writing. We summarise the findings of studies that have utilised some form of corpus analysis to investigate clinical documents, media texts, and personal narratives, highlighting the importance of interpreting the outputs generated using corpus tools in relation to the contexts in which the texts were produced. To this end, we discuss the value of quality metadata in corpus construction.
