A medical panorama: The Casebooks Project

The casebooks of the fellow astrologer-physicians Simon Forman and Richard Napier, covering the period 1596–1634, are among the largest and richest medical archives in history. The Casebooks Project is making them accessible online to both specialist and non-specialist users in a way that would be completely impossible in a print edition. This paper describes the nature and significance of the archive, the challenges involved in interpreting and encoding it, and the strategies we have developed to meet those challenges. In particular, it focuses on the task of making the material comprehensible to a modern audience while remaining true to the structure and terminology of the original documents.