Using Digitised Medical Journals in a Cross European Project on Addiction History

Abstract

This article draws on research conducted as part of a European project on the changing terminology used to conceptualise habitual drug, alcohol or tobacco use. We wanted to find out what language was utilised in Italy, Poland, Austria and the UK and how those concepts had changed since the mid-nineteenth century. We intended to make use of digitised journals for key word searches to enable comparisons to be made across countries and across time. Nothing, however, was straightforward. Few countries had digitised medical journals, so researchers had to use traditional search methods. Even in the UK, where journals were available digitally, there were problems with access and the searches that could be made. Digitisation did not provide a quicker way of researching cross nationally. Nonetheless our work did arrive at some valuable new conclusions. Our experiences also raise wider questions about using digitised journals for historical research.

Mining Medical Journals: Religion and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Medicine.

“…Even such seemingly uncomplicated types of questions have confronted historians with the need to always triangulate digital results with textual analysis and contextualization (Aiello and Simeone 2019). As medical historians Alex Mold and Virginia Berridge concluded in a comparative study of the use of terms related to addiction, "focusing only on terms and not the context in which they existed both on the page and more broadly risks missing the bigger picture" (Mold and Berridge 2019). Moreover, in research such as ours, that goes beyond the scope of a mere conceptual history and aims to understand the role of religion or ideology in discussions between doctors, more sophisticated forms of textual analysis are needed.…”