Minna Vihla. Medical writing. Modality in focus (Language and Computers:

There are only few books on modality having such a practical purpose as the one written by Minna Vihla on Medical writing. Vihla, herself a medical doctor in her pre-linguistic life, was once asked by a colleague " 'What can I answer a patient who is afraid of having cancer?' The difficulty of finding a suitable answer reflects the relevance of modality in medical language. On the one hand, the categorical statement 'you don't have cancer' is, strictly speaking, not acceptable if the answer is not supposed to surpass the limits of what can be verified. On the other, an utterance containing a modal qualification, 'it is unlikely that you would have cancer,' hardly has the right pragmatic effect. " (p. vii). Medical writing is of course not a guidebook on how to use medical language but rather a thorough analysis of how modal expressions are employed in the