The representation of women in three medical texts

The theoretical framework of this paper is based on the literature on language and ideology as well as language and gender, focussing on the reflection of gender ideologies in medical texts. Three medical texts were analysed with regard to the linguistic representation of women. While one text is taken from a gynaecological textbook, the other two texts are representative of popular medical books. The main objective of the study was to determine how ideologies of gender are reflected in the authors’ choice of lexis, and the syntactic relations in the texts. The findings indicated that the use of language mirrors the ideological orientation of the authors, and that medical discourse is characterised to a large degree by sexist language.