Not HIPAA. Casebooks containing the medical records of Simon Forman ( insert ) and 30,000 patients in the 17th century by Richard Napier are posted.
Bodleian Libraries / University of Oxford; (Box) Wikipedia
CAMBRIDGE, UK- If you lived in Shakespeare's time and wanted to know if your sick child was going to do, you might to have paid a visit to the offices of shady doctor-cum-astrologer Simon Forman, who with his student Richard Napier, advised more than 30,000 patients and customers during their career. Forman listen to your description of symptoms, write them meticulously as you mentioned, consult the stars, and give you a prognosis or suggest treatment. Although his physician colleagues considered him a charlatan, Forman's bad reputation may be about to get a boost; his collections between 1596 and 1634 years have now turned out to be all the more extensive and systematic medical records known from this period. Historians put these documents online for all to read and study the medical trends in Elizabethan England.
medical historian Flurin Condrau of the University of Zurich in Switzerland, which is not involved in the project, said the notes are a great resource for historians, with a dream cohort of tens of thousands more patients nearly 4 decades. "We know very little about what was going on between the doctor and the patient," even in more recent times, he said. "All we have is medical writing, which is partisan" as these practitioners tend to "write on their expertise."
"No one else stood records like this, or if they were, they did not survive," said Lauren Kassell, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, who heads the project. The 64 heavy volumes in which Forman and Napier recorded more than 50,000 cases are now housed at the University of Oxford Bodleian Library, illegible to the untrained eye. The project Forman Casebooks Simon, which was officially announced last week on the 400th anniversary of Forman, is to transcribe into a readable format and post them online in a searchable database. Kassell believes that this task is a million words, but the end result will allow researchers to track individual patients or for decades to study conditions, historical dates, and other variables to learn about trends.
First, Forman seems an unlikely source for serious researchers. In addition to astrology, he dabbled in alchemy and alleged devil worship. He was also self-centered, a notorious sexual predator, and the whole "not a nice man," said Kassell. But these defects had a head for history. Because Forman, unlike his contemporaries, needed to track objects movements in the solar system to make its predictions, his notes are extraordinarily systematic and comprehensive medical records. They contain the names, ages, addresses, family members, and patient symptoms to him and even the time of day during which he saw them visited. He also noted factors such as family and legal problems, providing "a very vivid picture in this world," says Kassell.
Kassell does not expect that researchers will discover treatments or medical practices previously unknown in the files. Condrau and warns that people diagnosed who lived long ago is a "minefield" because the modern bias is so strong. But he said he was surprised that astrology was discussed openly between doctors and customers, since a healthy competition happened between astrologers, doctors, herbalists and other healers of time. "If you were pregnant, you have various options as to where you can go," he said. Apparently, "an astrologer was one of the most reliable."
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