Overview

Abstract

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. An engagement framework informs this 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 to the production of knowledge, both on paper and in xml, with broader questions about the history of record keeping, the meanings of archives, and the nature of scholarship in the twenty-first century.

About the Speaker

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^* and co-edited Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, 2018).

^*More information about the Casebooks Project is available online at: https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk

Organizer

CRF Project “Making Modernity in East Asia: Technologies of Everyday Life, 19^th – 21^st Centuries” (RGC CRF The University of Hong Kong C7011-16G), Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong

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