This site, constructed for the pilot project, is no longer being updated. There is a new website for the Casebooks Project on which the edited texts will appear. An updated database of Forman's casebooks will be available there from 31 December 2011. In the meantime the pilot's database remains accessible.
Forman's diagram of the astrological houses and their bodily effects: MS Ashmole 389, f. [11].
Medical casebooks provide a lens into the consulting room. They record who consulted a practitioner, the diseases they complained about, and the remedies they took. They also document the practitioner's understanding of medicine and provide glimpses of the patient's experience of illness and healing.
The Casebooks Project will provide the first full account of the most extensive surviving set of early-modern medical records, the astrological casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier. An electronic edition of the 50,000 consultations that they conducted between 1596 and 1634 will be mounted on an open-access website.
The Pilot Project produced a database of Forman’s casebooks.
The full project was awarded a Programme Grant from the Wellcome Trust (£398,817), based at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge and conducted in partnership with the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, where the manuscripts are held. The project began on 1 April 2010 and will run for 39 months. Lauren Kassell leads the project, with Michael Hawkins as Technical Director and Robert Ralley and John Young as Research Associates.
