This edited book showcases original research in the study of healthcare and health communication, while also providing a detailed overview of contemporary methods of discourse analysis. Discourse approaches remain under-represented in the field of health communication, despite their potential for affording detailed understanding of health-related text and talk across an array of contexts, for example in face-to-face and digital healthcare encounters, health promotion, and patients' accounts of illness experiences. This book aims to address this gap in the literature by offering the first book-length treatment of different approaches to discourse analysis in health(care) and illness contexts, and it will appeal both to linguists and to researchers in nursing and health sciences, sociology and anthropology.

Gavin Brookes is Senior Research Associate in the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK. Daniel Hunt is Assistant Professor of Discourse Analysis in the School of English, University of Nottingham, UK.