Clinical case reports in Catalan: Vitality and suggestions

Abstract

Healthcare professionals have a genre at their disposal to narrate the clinical experiences of their patients for didactic or research purposes. This genre is the clinical case report (CCR), a type of highly specialized narrative with specific rhetorical features. Because they are not canonical research articles, CCRs had been relegated to a secondary role in traditional scientific journals. However, they are now acquiring a growing presence in online journals. In addition, they are widely used in the training of future healthcare professionals. Therefore, any language community that aspires to reverse language shift should ensure that it is also present in this genre. Based on the revision of a CCR corpus in the field of mental health, in this paper we discuss the characteristics of CCRs in Catalan and their vitality, and we make some suggestions for improving the contribution of this genre to the dissemination of the Catalan language in health sciences.

Keywords: medical communication, discursive genres, clinical case report, Catalan in health sciences, language uses, mental health.