MedCat – Corpus Medicorum Catalanorum is a new open access digital resource for the social and cultural history of medicine and health. MedCat is a database that systematizes and classifies a huge quantity of archive documents on the practice of medicine and all the other healthcare professions (relative to both humans and animals), and on the cultural manifestations of health in the territory of the old Crown of Aragon (Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands). Its chronological framework is, first and foremost, the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (13th-16th centuries), although in future it could be extended to the entire preindustrial age.
The documentary corpus that MedCat makes available is the result of the personal research of several generations of researchers, who since the 19th century have worked in these specialist areas – and in others – of the social and cultural history of old texts. In this respect, MedCat is a resource designed to recover, preserve and highlight the results of those efforts, thanks to the unprecedented possibilities of exploitation now provided by the Digital Humanities.
It will contain the documentary materials of Antoni Cardoner, Luis García Ballester and Michael McVaugh, the researchers who during the 20th century most marked the study of these subjects, by basing it precisely on documentary research, in this way following in the footsteps of Josep Rodrigo Pertegàs, Lluís Comenge or Josep Maria Roca. It will also contain the materials of the directors of MedCat, but it is intended to be a resource open to collaboration by any of the many other researchers who may wish to join in, and some have already agreed to contribute their materials.
MedCat is one of the initiatives of the Sciència.cat research group, currently funded by a project of the Spanish Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigación, MICINN), and it is a resource directed by Lluís Cifuentes (University of Barcelona) and Carmel Ferragud (University of Valencia).
Source: https://medcat.sciencia.cat