History of Science and Medicine Presents: "Inscribed, Coded, Archived: Digitizing Early Modern Medical Casebooks"

Day by day, through the decades around 1600, a pair of English astrologer-physicians documented their consultations. They filled 30,000 manuscript pages with cases. This is one of the largest surviving sets of private medical records in history. They are the focus of the Casebooks Project, a team of historians of science and medicine who have produced a dataset of the information in the casebooks, a web-based search interface, a viewer for images of the original manuscripts, and explanatory material about the records and their milieu. For our main website, see https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk. An engagement framework informed our work, shaping the data and its presentation. This talk reflects on what it means to create a new archive out of an old archive. It brings together approaches from the histories of science and medicine and the production of knowledge, both on paper and in XML, with broader questions about the nature of scholarship in the twenty-first century.

Bio: Lauren Kassell is Professor of the History of Science and Medicine in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. She is author of Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford, 2005) and numerous articles. She directs the Casebooks Project (https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/) and co-edited Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, 2018).