Leonardo Zilio (UC Louvain): "Medical Data from the 18th and 19th Centuries: Computational Processing and Terminology"

Please note time change!

Abstract:

This talk presents past and ongoing work with historical medical documents. I will present some work on automatic spelling normalization and information extraction done on Portuguese historical corpora from the 18th and 19th centuries. More recently, a parallel corpus was added to the collection, with the inclusion of several chapters from the book by G. Mauran, written in French in 1786, Avis aux gens de mer sur leur santé [Advice to sea people about their health], which was translated to Portuguese in 1794 by the High Surgeon of the Royal Navy, Bernardo José de Carvalho. Currently, the corpus includes medical knowledge for sea people, for domestic use, as well as for slaves that worked in Brazilian plantations, and the work with this broad corpus of medical data lays the foundation for future research that aims to identify important information in the historical data and link it, when possible, to contemporary information. While the focus has so far mostly been on terminological data referring to diseases, treatments, medications, and ingredients that were encountered and administered at that time, a less specialized vocabulary of named entities and socio-demographical data is also collected for future investigation into historical customs and society from a medical point of view.

Cultivating Patients is a network organised as part of the ActDisease project at the Department of History of Science and Ideas. This is a digital seminar series. For link, please reach out to the contact person.

Read more about the network here.