In the decades around 1600, the astrologers Simon Forman and Richard Napier produced one of the largest surviving sets of medical records in history. With support from the Wellcome Trust, a team of scholars at the University of Cambridge (the Casebooks Project) has transformed this paper archive into a digital archive.
Today, the Project’s director, Prof. Lauren Kassell, announced the completion of its work. I reproduce the announcement with her permission.
The work of the Casebooks Project is complete. All 80,000 cases recorded by Simon Forman, Richard Napier, and their associates between 1596 and 1634, with some stray cases either side, can now be browsed and searched. Our new website has an improved interface and additional pages about the astrologers, their patients, their practices, the project, and how to use these records.
The main casebooks website contains the digital edition and critical introduction, but one website was not enough. Our dataset is on GitHub. Digital facsimiles of all sixty-six volumes are accessible through Cambridge Digital Library
To showcase the contents of full cases—the scope of the project did not extend to transcribing the judgments—we have prepared five hundred fully-transcribed cases and a selective index of interesting things from across the corpus. For daily cases drawn from these collections, follow us on Twitter (@hpscasebooks). For news about Astrologaster, the computer game inspired by Forman’s casebooks (drawing on our historical expertise but made by game developers) follow @doctorforman.
The Casebooks Project is an immensely skilled and dedicated team of scholars: Michael Hawkins (Technical Director), Robert Ralley (Senior Editor), John Young (Senior Editor), Joanne Edge (Assistant Editor), Janet Yvonne Martin-Portugues (Assistant Editor), and Natalie Kaoukji (Research Fellow). They have made the project what it is and I offer them my wholehearted thanks.
For a history of the project, and a long list of acknowledgements that begins with staff at the Wellcome Trust, our generous funders, and the Bodleian Library, which owns the manuscripts, see https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/about-us/casebooks-project.
Lauren Kassell
Professor of History of Science and Medicine
Fellow of Pembroke College
University of Cambridge
