Reporting Research Critically and the Argumentative Way: A Key Feature of the “Results” and “Discussion” Sections of a Medical Article

An examination of a random sample of four medical journals— The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine—reveals that one-fifth of the space of articles in medical science is devoted to an average of three tables and three flow charts, graphs, or photographs. Given these figures, the absence of discussion of visuals in the literature on medical communication may seem puzzling. But the puzzle is easily solved: our basic education gives us a coherent vocabulary for talking about prose, but no coherent vocabulary for talking about tables and visuals. Once we have this vocabulary in hand, we make another step in the direction of an explanation of the nature of communication in the medical sciences. We may note that understanding the meaning of a medical article is not just a consequence of understanding its texts; it is a consequence of understanding all its meaningful components working together—verbal, tabular, visual.

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"How to Write a Medical Article—A Plea for Plagiarism."

JAMA ◽

10.1001/jama.1903.02490430040013 ◽

1903 ◽

Vol XLI (24) ◽

pp. 1486

Author(s):

W. E. Fitch

Keyword(s):

Medical Article

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THE CIRCULATING MEDICAL ARTICLE.

JAMA ◽

10.1001/jama.1904.02490560026016 ◽

1904 ◽

Vol XLII (11) ◽

pp. 716

Keyword(s):

Medical Article

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Analysis theorico-practica de viribus virus febriferi, pestiferi, atque serpentin

Acta medico-historica Adriatica ◽

10.31952/amha.19.2.6 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 19 (2) ◽

pp. 281-289

Author(s):

Samir Delibegović ◽

Alan Matošević

Keyword(s):

Infectious Diseases ◽

History Of Medicine ◽

Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽

Medical Writing ◽

Review Article ◽

Important Place ◽

Medical Article ◽

History Of

This review describes the first medical article written by an author from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The article was published by Fr. Franjo Gracić (1740-1799), in Latin, under the title: “Analysis theorico-practica de viribus virus febriferi, pestiferi, atque serpentin”, and printed in Padua in 1795, translated as: “A Theoretical and Practical Presentation of the Effects of Fevers, Infectious Diseases, and Snake Poison”. From today’s standpoint, it may be said that it was a review article about some of the most frequent diseases of that time. The paper is of exceptional importance for the history of medicine in Bosnia and Herzegovina because it is the first documented medical article whose author was from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper contains observations of the course of diseases and treatment, in line with the medical insights of the time. The author refers to the authorities of that time, such as Samuel Auguste André Tissot, the Swiss physicist and doctor, Georg Bauer, the German doctor, and Lodovico Antonio Muratori, the Italian scholar, which makes this article a link between Bosnia and Herzegovina and the knowledge of the Europe of that time. This paper represents the beginning of medical writing in Bosnia and Herzegovina and has a very important place in the history of medicine in this country.

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