Intersecting Wards and Ranks: a Linguistic and Discursive Analysis of Military Medical Bioethics

As the military conducts research and experiments that advance technological and medical progress, the multifaceted status of its medical professionals and the challenges they face provide new parameters that test its standard operating procedures. There is, in fact, a blurred line between the aspirations of medical research/practice and the Department of Defense’s directives, especially since the legal standing of military healthcare has become an international concern due to the war on terrorism. As a result, military physicians deal with a variety of pressing ethical and moral issues in treating patients with diverging legal statuses, working in environments that range from combat to humanitarian zones, and solving situations in which they are compelled to make life changing and potentially controversial decisions, often without assistance. Moreover, they must do so while adhering to the military’s strict regulations and restrictions, as well as its professional language and genres. To analyse the military community’s knowledge dissemination in relation to the activity of its medical professionals and proposals on how to deal with their conflicting roles, the Defense Health Board’s 2015 Ethical Guidelines and Practices for Us Military Medical Professionals will be the focus of a combined quantitative corpus linguistics and qualitative critical discourse analysis.