Digital Editions
Digital editions play a central role in historical studies and are also becoming increasingly important in medical history.
Not only do they make historical documents and sources accessible to a wide audience, but digital technologies also offer new possibilities for analysis, networking and presentation.
This enables access to rare or difficult-to-access documents, such as handwritten medical journals or medical treatises, which until now could often only be viewed on site in archives.
High-resolution facsimiles, searchable transcriptions and critical commentaries allow researchers and interested parties to use these sources regardless of location and time.
In medical history, for example, this allows for the systematic evaluation of patient records, the analysis of medical discourse, or the reconstruction of historical disease progression and treatment methods.
A particular added value of digital editions lies in their interactivity and the ability to efficiently access and link large amounts of data.
Projects such as the IGM's digital edition of Samuel Hahnemann's medical journals or the medieval Conciliator at the University of Cologne show how digital methods can accelerate research, promote the reuse of data and enable interdisciplinary questions to be asked in the first place.
For medical history, this means that digital editions create transparency, ensure long-term access to sources, and enable new research questions and approaches. As a result, they form an important basis for digital historical research.
Past Projects
(Editors: Arno Michalowski, Florian Barth, Marius Maile, Artjom Balabanov, Fabian Schan und Annabel Köppel)
The legacy of Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843), the founder of homeopathy, is housed in the Homeopathy Archive of the Institute for the History of Medicine. It primarily consists of his patient journals and extensive correspondence. This collection of sources, which is unique in the history of homeopathy, social history and medical history, documents over 40 years of continuous practice from 1800 to 1843. Hahnemann's 54 surviving patient journals – 37 volumes in German from 1802 to 1835 with the signature D, 17 volumes in French from his time in Paris (from 1835) with the signature DF – form the most extensive collection of source material.
In order to make these sources accessible to a wider audience in a critical printed edition, the patient journals have been catalogued in MS-WORD since 1989 according to standardised editing guidelines. In a pilot project, the transcription of the French patient journal DF5 (1837-1842) available in Word was transferred to the markup format of the Text Encoding Initiative as an example, and standards and workflows for existing and further transcriptions were developed in order to make the patient journals available online in a digital critical edition in the future.
Samuel Hahnemanns Krankenjournal DF5. Digitale kritische Edition