Digital Medical History

With the increasing use of digital tools and the relevance of digitally available data, the digital humanities have established themselves as an interdisciplinary field of research that combines digital approaches from the natural sciences and computer science with approaches from the humanities. Digital history also conducts research and works with digital methods to explore and present historical sources and topics. These digital methods and approaches sometimes make new research questions possible or simplify them.

In the field of medical history, this means, among other things, digitally accessing and researching historical sources. At the IGM, therefore, at the interface between research and archives, there is a focus on edition projects and the development of historical sources for science – in order to make older and difficult-to-read sources available to an interested public. For several years now, the focus has been on a core collection of the Homeopathy Archive, Samuel Hahnemann's patient journals.

Current Projects:

• Digital Edition of Samuel Hahnemann's Medical Journals

  Editor: Lukas Buchholz-Hein
  Based on the transcriptions of medical journals since the 1960s and the standardised transcription guidelines in place since 1989, the medical journals have been made available to a wider audience in a critical printed edition. After the first medical journal was published as a digital critical edition in a pilot project and further medical journals were subsequently made available in digital form, the current aim is to present them on a standardised platform and to continue the transcription work.